Teaching traditional Yao dance in the digital environment: Forms of managing subcultural forms of cultural capital in the practice of local creative industries

The use of digital environment technologies, such as virtual reality, is a modern way to teach dance. The use of virtual reality, as a new method of digital interaction between human and machine, makes it possible to solve the problems associated with the lack of feedback, as, for example, in video lessons. It provides users with a three-dimensional virtual world that has immersive and interactive characteristics, solves the problem of time and place limitations, tracks student actions, and monitors and corrects them, thereby enabling students and teachers to implement learning even under challenging pandemic constraints. Innovative pedagogical approaches also generate additional interest among today's students, which makes it possible to use them to make students more interested in studying traditional dance as a national and subcultural form of cultural capital. The research purpose is an experimental test study of the digital technology capabilities of a virtual reality system with motion capture for teaching dance (using the example of the traditional Chinese Yao dance). Eighty-three people (N = 83) took part in the study, randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. Preliminary tests of the experimental and control groups were compared using a two-sample t-test. There was no significant difference in the initial scores of the experimental and control groups. As a result of the analysis, it was revealed that there was a significant difference between the progress indicators in the experimental and control groups. The average improvement in the experimental group (11.48) was significantly higher than in the control group (2.86). A survey of students showed that 100% of the experimental group participants and 86.5% of the control group participants are ready to recommend the proposed teaching technology. Thus, it was found that the feedback offered to experimental group students facilitates the students' task of learning dance.