Musicality in Dance | This Dancing Life

Posted on 18/06/2018
“Musicality in Dance”

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Dancers and dance students hear this word in class, over and over again. Musicality is one of those things teachers go on about, like placement, or not rolling your ankles. Watching great dancers, you are supposed to be able to sense their musicality in every move. As dance students, we’re required to have this musicality trick. If we haven’t got it naturally (and how do we know, anyway?) we’re going to have to learn it, somehow. The question is, what does “musicality” actually mean? Does it really exist, or is it just some subjective idea? What is it? How can we get it?

Musicality is not just dancing on the beat (it’s not that simple, although rhythm of course is fundamental). There are other parts of music besides the beat — you can hear them all if you really listen. Using piano, you could dance to the melody in the right hand, or the rhythm in the left, or switch back and forth between the two. You might coordinate your movement within phrases of music, or follow the dynamic contours of a melody, syncopated perhaps, or smooth and legato, or broken into jagged, staccato accents. In the orchestra, you could run with a kinetic impulse from the strings, or hook onto the brass, or hang with a single percussion instrument, or stay inside the bass pizzicato which underpins the whole piece. Is there a recurring Leitmotif, regular or irregular, for which you might dance a corresponding dynamic? Maybe you want to work just to snapping fingers, or live feedback from yourself and others, or even silence, within which your movement reveals latent rhythm – this too is music. There’s music of some sort all around you, and even inside you – (they say your heart, for example, beats in waltz time…)

As a musically skilled performer, you respond selectively to all of these, using musicality to affect the perceptions and instincts of the audience. In fact, you literally “embody” the music you hear, dancing with every part of you to make the fusion of music and movement real and personal, for you and for the onlooker. Your entire body: head, arms, legs, spine, even eyebrows, can move specifically and precisely with what you hear, expressing what you as an artist want to say. Does a vocal line give you something specific? Then you might want to interpret the song as dance, possibly dancing the lyrics, possibly doing the opposite. Another type of musicality could be to work directly against the music. You could dance slow, sustained, movement against a background of punchy, insistent, inescapable drums, to convey supernatural calm or mounting tension. The interplay between what spectators hear and what they see can be powerful, disturbing, hypnotic – it’s an effective performance tool. With it you reach deep inside the soul of the audience, pull them along with you, make them want to dance.

Perhaps “musicality” cannot be precisely defined in words. And yet — all the possibilities we have listed, and more that we haven’t, display one essential, unifying trait. Musical dancers select components of music and make these crucial to every nuance of what they do, sharing their experience with the spectator. Dance exists symbiotically in and through the music, and the music flows in and through the dancer, directly affecting the audience. Musical dancers literally use the moving body to become part of their music, revealing its highlights and secret places. This intimate musical relationship raises the intensity of danced performance.

As the great American choreographer George Balanchine pointed out, “Dance is music made visible”.

Dance has been part of us since our forebears began to stand on two legs. Scientists are still trying to find out why and when this happened. One theory suggests that some 6 million years ago, a gene mutation for hairlessness appeared in our Chimpanzee/Human Last Common Ancestor, and over generations they became, literally, naked. Infants could no longer cling to the fur of their mothers; now they had to be carried in both hands, which forced the species to adapt to walking erect[1],[2]. Individuals who failed to do so lost their offspring, and their tribe died out. Evolution favoured a skeletal development of lower limbs and spine to upright stance. Other studies offer a much earlier date for the development of walking, as far as 7 to 9 million years ago[4], and there is also uncertainty about whether our ancestors may actually have been tree-dwellers[4],[5].

The evidence suggests that music and dance are even older than speech. Mothers, obliged to warm, protect, feed, and shelter their offspring, frequently needed to put them down in order to forage. Any youngster not close beside its mother is vulnerable; grunts and howls were the only way to keep track of wayward children. Early human and Neanderthal fossils show bony configurations in the upper spine associated with regular prolonged and controlled vocal activity[3]. Clearly mothers and infants (and therefore whole tribes) systematically vocalised to find, warn, and summon each other. They had to develop ways to convey different concepts, using vocalisation without words. This communication encouraged the physiological and neurological conditions for reduced defensive/aggressive behaviour, which in turn encouraged social cueing, different types of utterance, facial expression, postural and gestural modification and the instinct to look after and protect each other.

In our time, speech development in children follows similar lines. Even before birth, the most frequent sound a child hears is its mother’s voice[8]. When a baby is delivered, the first sounds it will hear will be its own crying and the familiar tones of its mother, already associated with protection, nourishment and contentment. Studies of new-born babies and their mothers show them collaborating, creating their own private “language”, modulating pitch, intensity, sound duration, and gesture, to tell each other precise concepts which they both understand[6],[9]. Their basic rhythms and melodies match each other, and they share a common movement vocabulary and timed interaction which can be described as metric. This wordless dialogue is known as “protoconversation” and it is specific to humans. As they bounce off each other’s rhythms, expressive content and tempi, a mother and her baby are essentially “jamming”, improvising response and counter-response in the manner of a jazz duet[7]. The gestures in their dialogue show them dancing with each other, to their own accompaniment. Even premature children, born as much as two months before full term, can initiate and join in structured, melodic, rhythmic, rule-based protoconversation, with repeated syllables and phrases[7]. This works even for children who are born blind, and who, never having seen any gesture, still dance with their mother in systematic and measurable movement patterns arising out of combined musical interaction[6].

We humans also distinguish variations in pitch; this ability too is ancient. For pitch to work in a flute made some forty thousand years ago from the shin-bone of an animal, the maker must have understood precisely how to shape, size and space the holes, both for the hand and breath of the player, and also for the desired tonality. Research on the Swabian Jura pipes from this period shows an amazingly detailed knowledge of pitch and interval, long-established and perfected over many generations[3].

Our exploratory delight in music, song and movement continues all our lives. Even toddlers, with almost no spoken vocabulary, happily invent, perform and share their own free, expansive vocalisation and movement, coordinating speed, balance and proprioception with story-telling, learning, intention and vigorous social interaction[6],[10]. Our capacity for gesture, for narration, for conveying intention, even for speech[9], all developed out of our inbuilt delight in expressive movement sequences. Apparently, we possess an inborn musicality, a creative impulse to movement, triggered by the music around us. Music and dance-like gesture are built into us from our beginnings, intrinsic to our very being.

The production of sound starts with movement, and before each movement comes the intention to execute it, occupying a tiny but measurable amount of time. This is true for dancers, as for musicians. There is a clear relationship between these “intention gaps” in music and those in dance[6]. Pre-movement timing variables in dance match those in the accompaniment, very like the relationship of music to movement in the mother-and-child duet.
Dancers in performance use facial expression, touch, gesture, dynamic and many other techniques. Audiences instinctively pick up the correlation in pre-action intention times for both dance and music, anticipating and remembering these coordinated time-gaps. Subconscious recognition of the performer’s intention gap stimulates a sympathetic reaction in the spectator, echoing his or her own inborn mother/child legacy of musical and movement-based relationship[9]. This implicit yet powerful impulse from both dancer and music invites the audience to join in, awakening a powerful desire to move, reinforced by millennia of genetic programming. When the music starts, we want to dance[14].

To quote the NYCB ballerina Suzanne Farrell, “As soon as I hear music, something in me starts to vibrate.”

The enjoyment of dancing with, in and through the music is no secret – it has been sung, talked and written about for years[14]. Being “in the groove” is all about enjoyment, pleasurable interaction with the essence of the music, swaying, foot-tapping, finger-snapping, movement of all sorts. A musical dancer looks and feels great, and becomes an attractive and compelling object of attention, so there’s a good deal of exhibitionism and a kind of mating display going on[16]. It’s very social, and a lot of the fun comes from interaction with other people, all feeling the same fundamental desire to dance[8]. This sense of immediacy, of shared experience, produces a major “feelgood” buzz for performers and audience alike. We lose ourselves in the movement and the music, forgetting the constraints of time and normality, a phenomenon known as “flow”[13],[10]. Actual physical changes take place in our bodies as the music and dance kick in – the gene polymorphisms known as AVPR1A and SLC6A4 are implicated in the euphoria we feel and are thought to act on the areas of our brain associated with reward and enjoyment, spiritual experiences, social relations and communication[15]. (Music can actually even change the structure of your brain[11]). It’s also a lot easier to coordinate all the things you have to do (steps, weight distribution, partner work, placement and so on) if you can hang it all on one central concept, which is of course the music running through you. Musicality is clearly not just subjective; it causes measurable physical and psychological changes, both in you and in your audience. Apparently, all those nagging teachers and ballet-masters and choreographers were right, then. Musicality is highly desirable, and it really does matter.

If you want to work on your musicality, the first thing you need is music. Listen to it, all different types of music, as much and as often as you can. Try to make sure you vary the choice, as well – if you`re mainly into salsa, try getting your head around some opera. It may feel hard at first, but you can do it. Start with a big, accessible, well-known piece: “Nessun’ dorma”, perhaps, or the great Brindisi waltz from La Traviata. Try the love songs from La Bohème, Carmen, Rigoletto or Don Giovanni as an entry port – there’s loads of good stuff there, massive and exciting, with chunky, glorious tunes and lashings of emotion. Different singers do it different ways – don’t miss the chance to compare them. Try jazz, try chamber music, try Reggae, Rap, Rock’n’Roll, Hip-Hop, Country & Western, folk , grime, Gregorian chant, anything and everything. Get to clubs, get to concerts, get to musicals. Listen intently, unscrew the sound and take it to pieces in your mind, analyse what’s coming down. How do those rhythms shift, change and syncopate? Which instruments carry the tune, who makes the rhythm, where’s the sound texture coming from, what are the emotions you’re experiencing and why? You can use all this stuff for dancing. Choose a piece you really like, listen to it several times in a row and pick out a different voice in the music each time, clapping or tapping your foot to it until you know every nut and bolt in the piece so well you could … dance it. Then do that. You can stay precisely with the musical influence you’re using, but you can also play with it – move a shade earlier or later than the accent and notice how this changes the message and content of what you are dancing. You can mold this material like plasticine, get right inside it and use it any way you want.

Clearly, musicality is every kind of good thing, and for you, this is a very useful discovery. Musicality is your key to technique, it delivers your emotional take-home message to the audience, it’s your inner self rejoicing, it’s who and what you are when you dance, and it’s deeply satisfying. Listen to it, get inside it, be it, have as much fun as you can with it. And now that you’ve discovered this mysterious, elusive quality, you can find out for and in yourself what musicality really means. Once you get there, you’ll know immediately what it’s all about. It feels just great, and it’s going to help your coordination, expand your technique and advance your artistry more than you ever thought possible.

This is your music — you’re the dancer — you can do this. Face the music, get down, let it all go, get right inside it … let it make you dance!
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References
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© Jeremy Leslie-Spinks