Creative Flow in Dance: Consensual Assessment of Creative Outcomes of Dance Group Improvisation

Group flow refers to peak experience when a group is performing at its highest level of abilities. This study examined the relationship between the group flow experience of an improvising group of contemporary dancers and their creative outcomes evaluated by the consensual assessment method (CAT). The dataset consists of the data and analysis used in the "Creative Flow in Dance: Consensual Assessment of Creative Outcomes of Dance Group Improvisation (in press)."

First, eight groups of four dancers were recruited to perform improvised dance scores for video recordings. The low and high-flow improvisations videoclips were selected based on dancers’ reports in the video-stimulated recall method, Flow (Łucznik, May, 2021).  Subsequently, these videoclips were rated by 77 experts and 126 nonexperts using CAT on five dimensions: aesthetic appeal, technique demands, meaningfulness, coherence /collaboration of the group, and creativity.

Experts rated high-flow improvisations as more creative than the low-flow ones. In comparison, nonexperts’ ratings of high and low-flow improvisation did not differ, although the reliability measures of nonexperts creativity judgments were noticeably lower than in the expert group. Regardless of expertise, creativity judgments were significantly related to all other CAT factors: aesthetic appeal, technique, meaningfulness and coherence of improvisation. The results provide evidence that group flow leads to higher creativity. Moreover, they suggest that subjective judgments of creativity of performance arts cannot be easily separated from judgments of their technical level, aesthetic appeal, meaningfulness or coherence of the group.