Analyzing the physics of dance can add fundamentally to a dancer's skill. Although dancers seldom see themselves totally in physical terms--as body mass moving through space under the influence of well-known forces and obeying physical laws--neither can they afford to ignore the physics of movement. For example, no matter how much a dancer wishes to leap off the floor and then start turning, the law of conservation of angular momentum absolutely prevents such a movement.

Some movements involving primarily vertical or horizontal motions of the body as a whole, in which rotations can be ignored, can be studied using simple equations of linear motion in three dimensions. However, rotational motions require more complex approaches that involve analyses of the way the body's mass is distributed, the axes of rotation involved in different types of movement, and the sources of the forces that produce the rotational movement.