Monday, September 06, 2010

Dancing as a Language

Music is a language. To those who are not fluet in this music, the conversations are of the musician are magical expressions of feeling and dream like images that amaze us. Like a spoken language, music as a lnaguage consists of a vocabulary and grammar that is internalized to an extent that it becomes a second nature. The language becomes like an ocean that musicians are fully immersed in and give no thought to as they move through their currents of musical expression.

Dancing is in many respects a dialect of this musical language that speaks to and converses with the bodies of those who understand its form. There is a vocabulary of steps that relate to there musical counterparts. In its simplest level it consists of:
1. a one step that steps on each beat.
2. a two step that changes weight twice on each beat
3. triplets that have three steps per every two beats i.e. one and two
4. hestitions movements that rests with the music.

The grammar of a dancing language in its simplest form is how these steps are related to the phasing in the musics. Which parts of the steps are accented. How the steps are combined into rhtyhms that move and stop with the phasing in the music.

The dialect of the language relates to where in the body the movement starts from, how the music moves the body, what part of body does the music move. The dialect is the style of the dance, the look it outw