Many of us think of musicality in terms of capturing every element we hear in a song. How do you represent that emotion in your dance? How does it affect and influence your movements, to make that step or move, tell us a story of love, anger, sadness? And so, your dance can capture that same emotion too. What is the essence of the song? Is it about love, hate, depression, pain, longing, sorrow, happiness, gratefulness, or some other emotion? The lyrics can help here, though the nature of the song itself and how the musicians play it should reflect that emotion as well, and be understandable regardless of what language you natively speak. Like any aspect of musicality, this can look boring and predictable when relied on too much, so it’s important to look beyond the lyrics. But it can also be used quite well by freestyle dancers who know their music well and want to impress a crowd. Most obviously, there’s often the literal translation of the lyrics to movement, which is quite common with a lot of choreographers that are looking for inspiration for movement. While much easier for native english speakers than foreigners, knowing the lyrics helps in many ways. Musicality is…the meaning and essence of a song. This cute guy is totally sitting in the pocket…
This is called independence in the drumming world, though we usually call it isolation in the dance world (though a different “isolation” than the one we use to refer to mime or robot movement, that isolates a part of our body movement-wise). Or going more complex, capturing two different instruments simultaneously, in different parts of our body. This can range from simpler approaches, like keeping the basic beat in our groove while playing accents with other parts of our body, such as keeping a jacking groove while adding in layers of footwork. The same way a pianist or drummer can move their two hands independently (and their foot pedals!), we can do the same in dance. Musicality is…showing multiple instruments, at the same time. Or it could be jumping between instruments, such as segueing from the end of a melody phrase back in into the underlying rhythm, that’s always waiting there underneath the music, ready to greet us when we return home. It can be as simple as switching off between multiple instruments in a call-and-response manner (typical of jazz-inspired music), representing different “voices” of instruments differently in our dance (hands vs feet, left vs right, big vs small, dainty vs strong, etc). Musicality is…showing multiple instruments. Whether it’s using multiple levels, the physical size of the movements, the fluidity of the movement, or where in the physical space around us we choose to represent them, there are many ways to make the unique properties of the music clear to our audience, beyond just the rhythms. Musicality is how we choose to capture those differing sounds in our dance, and how we choose to represent them in our movement. High vs low pitches, drawn-out and legato vs short and staccato, strong and accented vs timid and subdued, or loud and fortissimo vs quiet and pianissimo. And in addition to capturing the timbre of the instrument, musicality is also capturing the way those instruments are played. A flute sounds different than a trumpet sounds different from a violin. Each instrument has a timbre, that differentiates it from other instruments playing the exact same melody. Musicality is….dancing to more than just the rhythm. Opening notes and rhythms of James Brown’s “I Feel Good” We can dig deeper into the song to find the softest instruments and rare instruments, that are never heard unless one searches for them, or a dancer draws them out to show them to you. We can practice our listening skills, trying to isolate out single instruments and rhythms in the song, and hold them, resisting the temptation to fall back into the flow of the stronger melodies. If we just dance to rhythms, we sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we have the rhythm when we don’t, and forcing ourselves to clap or tap out a rhythm helps us improve our ability to capture those rhythms.
We can practice by clapping out these rhythms with our hands, to ensure what we hear from our hands matches what we hear from the music. Whether it’s the foundational boom-clap of popping music, or the melody of a singer or lead instrument, there’s rhythm in every instrument in our music. Musicality is expressing the rhythm of notes from an instrument, through our bodies. Musicality is…dancing to the instrumental rhythms.
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