Everybody Dance Now is a dataset of videos that can be used for training and motion transfer. It contains long single-dancer videos that can be used to train and evaluate the model. All subjects have consented to allowing the data to be used for research purposes.

Synchronized movement is a ubiquitous feature of dance and music performance. Much research into the evolutionary origins of these cultural practices has focused on why humans perform rather than watch or listen to dance and music. In this study, we show that movement synchrony among a group of performers predicts the aesthetic appreciation of live dance performances. We developed a choreography that continuously manipulated group synchronization using a defined movement vocabulary based on arm swinging, walking and running. The choreography was performed live to four audiences, as we continuously tracked the performers’ movements, and the spectators’ affective responses. We computed dynamic synchrony among performers using cross recurrence analysis of data from wrist accelerometers, and implicit measures of arousal from spectators’ heart rates. Additionally, a subset of spectators provided continuous ratings of enjoyment and perceived synchrony using tablet computers. Granger causality analyses demonstrate predictive relationships between synchrony, enjoyment ratings and spectator arousal, if audiences form a collectively consistent positive or negative aesthetic evaluation. Controlling for the influence of overall movement acceleration and visual change, we show that dance communicates group coordination via coupled movement dynamics among a group of performers. Our findings are in line with an evolutionary function of dance–and perhaps all performing arts–in transmitting social signals between groups of people. Human movement is the common denominator of dance, music and theatre. Acknowledging the time-sensitive and immediate nature of the performer-spectator relationship, our study makes a significant step towards an aesthetics of joint actions in the performing arts.

This dataset contains time-series for performer and spectator variables for all four performances.

Across all cultures, people dance. Yet, little is known about what function dance and the performing arts fulfill in society, or why TV shows such as "Strictly come dancing" are so popular. We propose that the appeal of dancing and watching dance partly lies in promoting and communicating successful cooperation between people. Research in social psychology has shown that when two people meet, they become more like each other. They imitate each others' accent, speech rate and syntax; they look at the same things and use the same words; they adopt similar postures, gesture alike and gently sway together. This behavioural coordination studied in social psychology seems to produce feelings of liking and affiliation between pairs of people. Similarly, when small groups of people interact, and move together, they also feel closer to each other and are more likely to cooperate. We will use dance as a means to study how moving together is linked to liking each other. Similarly, observing other people move together may produce aesthetic pleasure because it showcases successful social interactions. Our research aims to provide novel insights into the role that dance and the performing arts fulfill in modern society. In a set of experiments, we will test this hypothesis by inviting groups of people (non-dancers) to participate in "dance workshop" experiments that teach moving in synchrony. Rather than asking participants to just "do the same", we will work with professional dancers and choreographers to apply principles from dance and choreography to examine different ways of moving together. Following these workshops, we will assess cooperation, sympathy and liking between participants of the workshop and members of the audience. Performers and audience members will be equipped with small motion sensors and we will also record their electrical brain activity. This will allow us to link different ways of moving in synchrony (or asynchrony) to brain activity, cooperation and liking. In a follow-up functional neuroimaging experiment we will link aesthetic pleasure derived from observing collective human movement to specific brain mechanisms. We will also explore clinical applications of our research project. For example the perception of human movement is impaired in patients with autism. Training to move in synchrony might help to improve such deficits in recognizing other people's actions because it requires to carefully monitor how movements are performed. Similarly, increasing awareness of an action by moving in synchrony may boost memory for an already performed action. In obsessive-compulsive disorder compulsive checking involves a vicious circle in which more checking paradoxically leads to less confidence in memory and impairs attention. Increasing action awareness through "over performing" obsessive actions or moving in synchrony with others could thus reduce obsessive behaviours such as washing by making it easier to remember that the action was performed already. In summary our research project combines expertise in dance, social...

The SHAMSA* bibliographical database and digital collection has been developed as part of the European Research Council project Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean (MUSTECIO, Grant no. 263643, PI Katherine Butler Schofield, 2011–2015/16). The attached xlsx document, licensed as a CC-BY-NC resource, provides the bibliographical metadata of Version 1.0 of the database. It describes well over 300 major written sources c. 1700-1900 for the history and analysis of North Indian (Hindustani) music and dance in Mughal and British-colonial South Asia. About one third – well over 100 – of these sources are also currently held in digital copies in the Department of Music at King’s College London. The SHAMSA digital collection already constitutes the largest single repository of primary written sources on Indian music and dance in the world, and is planned to be a major ongoing resource for future researchers on Indian music, dance, and cultural history.

The sources of SHAMSA 1.0 were located and consulted Jan 2011– Dec 2015 by members of the Awadh Case Study of the ERC Musical Transitions project, including James Kippen, David Lunn, Allyn Miner, Katherine Butler Schofield, Margaret E Walker, and Richard David Williams. The initial collection has clearly defined limits: it 1) focusses on the Gangetic plains region between Delhi, Lucknow, and Calcutta; 2) during the timeframe c. 1700-1900 i.e. explicitly before the era of recorded sound (but with some key 17C and 20C outliers, and some materials from e.g. Hyderabad, Kashmir). 3) The linguistic focus of the collection is on works largely in Persian, Brajbhasha/Hindavi, Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, but with some works in Sanskrit, English, and other Northern Indian vernacular languages. Sources include music and dance treatises, biographical works (tazkiras), song collections, ethnographic works, department archives, encyclopedias, cosmographies, theatre scripts, moral and ethical tracts, histories, and a tiny handful of the large number of extant ragamala painting sets (for a comprehensive treatment of ragamala sets see e.g. Ebeling 1973 and the Ebeling digital image collection at Cornell).

It is critically important to note that this is by no means a complete collection of everything written on music and dance in Northern India in the period of transition from the Mughal to the British empires. We have been completely overwhelmed by the volume and richness of the materials we have uncovered for the history of music and dance before the period of recorded sound. This bibilography should be considered a mere starting point; we are already aware of a large number of sources, especially visual, that we have not yet included. Version 1.0 consists only of (largely) textual sources that at least one of the team members personally consulted 2011–15, and considered to include substantial and noteworthy musical and/or dance-related contents (very occasionally key sources are also included that we know about, but have been unable to locate yet despite our best efforts.)

We know that there are many more written and visual sources for North Indian forms of music and dance beyond the geographical, temporal, and/or linguistic scope of the current version of this database – for example for Panjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, etc. – but even considering our core region and timeframe we keep uncovering more sources all the time, and aim to update the open access versions of the database periodically. We would be delighted to hear from anyone who has information about sources that are not yet in our database that we might be able to consult and include, or about any verifiable errors in the metadata that need correcting.

Well over one third of the works in the bibliographical file are already available to consult as digital copies in situ at King’s College London. The copyright statuses of these copies are exceedingly complex; but we aim to make as many of these available via Creative Commons licenses as and when we gain approval from the holders of the original documents to do so. Please do get in touch with Dr Katherine Schofield at King’s College London if you wish to consult the digital copies in the SHAMSA collection, or if you have suggestions of works whose metadata should be included in the bibliographical list. (Version 1.0 was completed 1 Jan 2016, and checked/exported 2 Oct 2018.)

*Deriving from the Persian word "shams", meaning "sun", a shamsa is both a ray of solar light often indicating the bestowal of special knowledge or enlightenment, and the technical term for an illuminated orb-like frontispiece in Islamicate manuscripts that often encloses the patron's name, titles, and/or portrait — see for example the beautiful shamsa for the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan that adorns the SHAMSA Community page (Metropolitan Museum of Art). In later lithographed works on music in Urdu, the title of the manuscript would often be enclosed in a shamsa. But the name SHAMSA also pays homage to the first Persian treatise on North Indian music written by an imperial hereditary musician, the Shams al-Aswat by Ras Baras Khan (1698), in which he named shams as the presiding star of the musical note Ma, the fourth scale degree (MUSTECIO 0131/British Library, I O Islamic 1746, f. 19r).

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner. This is a mixed methods data collection. This project set out to investigate the rise of lap dancing in the UK and the experiences of women who work in the industry in relation to working conditions and their feelings about work. The project also aimed to explore the role of regulation and governance of the industry and the night time economy in relation to women's experiences as dancers. To do this, the largest English survey so far of dancers/strippers was undertaken (196 responses), and interviews were conducted with 35 dancers across the country and 20 people who worked in clubs as managers, owners, door security, and 'housemums'. A further 15 interviews were conducted with those officials who regulate the industry such as licensing officers and health and safety and police personnel. While 20 clubs across the country were visited during the study, fieldwork was largely concentrated in one city in the North of England and one in the South. Users should note that the UK Data Archive study contains a subset of these data, comprising only the dancers' quantitative survey and seven of the interviews conducted with licensing/health and safety personnel. The project found that many younger women are entering dancing as it offers the benefits of flexible, cash-in-hand work that requires minimal commitment or responsibility. Women generally enjoyed their work and its advantages, although there were regular reports of harassment from customers. Women were using dancing strategically to either further their education or career or position themselves better in the labour market in the future. There were issues raised regarding some clubs' lack of consideration for the welfare of their workers. Most notably, there was evidence of financial exploitation from managers as women would pay high 'house fees' and commission, often earning very little money after a shift. The project found no evidence connecting lap dancing to organised prostitution or trafficking. The project found that lap dancing is a precarious form of work which was ironically enabling women to avoid insecure employment and personal circumstances in the future. Further information about the project and links to publications may be found on the ESRC The Regulatory Dance: Investigating the Structural Integration of Sexual Consumption into the Night Time Economy award webpage and the University of Leeds Social Sciences Institute Regulatory Dance webpage. Main Topics: The interviews with local authority/police personnel covered: health and safety legislation applied to clubs, relations with club owners, licencing, inspections and dancers' working conditions. The dancers' survey covered: demographic details, children, marital status, income, educational background and qualifications, employment history in dancing and other occupations, working conditions in clubs, and attitudes to dancing. Convenience sample Face-to-face interview