‘Listening is done by using all the senses’ a study of how dancers create, communicate and perceive a choreographed dance

This article presents results from a project on dance and music with 16 dancers at different levels of experience who worked with a choreographer for an upcoming performance. The focus was on the participating dancers’ perceptions of how they, through improvisational models, created movement in small groups, communicated these dance sequences to each other and how they perceived these instructions. The research methods were observations and semi-structured interviews where categories emerged during the study process. The results showed that the strategies that the dancers used most considered visualisation, auditory, tactile/kinesthetic senses.