IntroductionThe contemporary dance transformation of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) and traditional folk culture elements has become an important phenomenon in Chinese stage art practice, but systematic empirical research on the psychological characteristics of the creators and performers involved is still lacking.MethodsThis study adopted a cross-sectional questionnaire design with 915 creators and performers who have documented experience participating in contemporary dances and dance dramas containing ICH or traditional folk elements to examine the relationship between creativity disposition, psychological resilience, and positive/negative emotional states.ResultsThe results showed that the sample’s psychological resilience score was M = 34.86, SD = 6.39, and the creativity disposition score was M = 41.31, SD = 5.64; the positive affect score was significantly higher than the negative affect score, t(914) = 24.02, p < 0.001, dz = 0.79. Correlation analysis indicated that creativity disposition was significantly positively correlated with psychological resilience and positive affect, and significantly negatively correlated with negative affect; psychological resilience was significantly positively correlated with positive affect and significantly negatively correlated with negative affect. Furthermore, cross-sectional mediation analysis revealed that while psychological resilience showed a statistically significant indirect association between creativity disposition and negative affect, the absolute magnitude of this indirect estimate was small, with an unstandardized indirect coefficient of B = −0.106, Bootstrap 95% CI [−0.136, −0.078]. K-Means clustering further identified three groups: high creativity-high resilience, low creativity-low resilience, and low creativity-high resilience.DiscussionThe findings suggest that psychological resilience may be an important psychological resource for understanding the relationship between the creativity disposition and negative affect of art creators and performers. However, given the cross-sectional design, the related findings should be interpreted as correlational evidence rather than causal conclusions.