‘Just clicks’: an interpretive phenomenological analysis of professional dancers’ experience of flow

TLDR

Flow is a psychological state where mind and body “just click,” enabling optimal performance, yet research on dancers’ flow experiences has been largely overlooked, creating a gap in dance psychology literature. The study employed interpretive phenomenological analysis of semi‑structured interviews with nine professional dancers across ballet, contemporary, jazz, Irish, and Canadian styles. Results identified three core themes—autotelic experience, challenge‑skill balance, and absorption—alongside unique facilitators and inhibitors of flow, offering choreographers and dancers actionable insights into environmental, social, and physical factors that can enhance flow.

Abstract

The subjective experience of flow in professional dancers was analyzed using interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). Flow is believed to be a psychological state in which the mind and body 'just click', creating optimal performance. Unfortunately, sport and performance research have severely neglected reviewing the flow experience in dancers, leading to a significant gap in dance psychology literature. Nine professional dancers, male and female, specializing in ballet, contemporary, jazz, Irish and Canadian dance were interviewed using in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews. The results recovered three main higher order themes consistent with Csikszentmihalyi (Citation1975): the autotelic experience, challenge vs. skill and absorption in the task. In addition to gaining insight into the experience of flow in dancers, the results showed that dance has its own unique facilitators and inhibitors of flow. The results offer choreographers, artistic directors and dancers information regarding the importance of environmental, social and physical elements of the dance world, thus enabling them to manipulate factors, whenever applicable, to enhance the flow experience.