Abstract As quoting in the philosophy of free dance: ‘understanding the directions for a free dance performer stems mainly from the qualities and energy of the movement rather from spatial criteria,’ we advocate generating computing dance movement by dynamic and energy. In this paper, we present a set of dynamic models according to dance verbs: ‘to sway,’ ‘to squat down,’ ‘to develop,’ ‘to walk,’ ‘to turn,’ and ‘half turn step over step.’ For each of them, we designed the simplest physically based particle model. Among them, user has a high‐level motion control to modify the quality of such dynamically generated movement, for example, light, strong, sudden, sustained, etc. These dynamic models are hence well suited to produce spontaneous motion that looks natural and plausible. Furthermore, by designing dance movement only with the necessary minimal models, it is possible to produce complex dance movement that exhibits energetic consistency as underlain by the philosophy of free dance. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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