Since people are always asking me what I mean by dancing “musically”, here are some of the things I understand by it. I try to think about these in my own dancing and I also teach seminars on some of these specific topics (2, 5, 7 and 8, in particular).
1. Choosing vocabulary to suit the musical color (I often like to think in Murat Erdemsel’s use of the terms kiki and bouba to classify movement vocabulary, i.e. more rounded steps for more legato musical moments and more abrupt, lineal or spiky movements for more staccato moments — but this is only one possibility).
2. Choosing to dance to unusual rhythms within the tango instead of just stepping on the main pulse: offbeats, syncopations, 3-3-2 patterns, etc.
3. Making minute differences in what dancers call “cadence” (I’m not using this term as a musician would) that is slowing down or speeding up within the step — i.e. choosing to glide or flow through the movement evenly; to suspend or delay it slightly and *almost* arrive late for the beat you want to land on; or to hurry and change weight *almost* early. This is subtle, but it can feel really great.
4. Changing the quality of your movement to suit the music, i.e. dancing the same step in very different ways to reflect what you are hearing (smoother, more abrupt, cleaner, more ornately decorated, more unrestrained, stompier, bigger or smaller in size to reflect dynamics, etc.).
5. Dancing to submelodies played by non-dominant instruments or secondary voices within the music (which might be shared between several instruments).
6. Dancing with leader and follower emphasizing different levels/voices/instruments/rhythms, etc. (The fact that leaders and followers often have different steps and timings in tango, rather than dancing as mirror images of each other, makes this very possible at some points in the dance. And decorations can also help to achieve this).
7. Using pauses judiciously, deliberately omitting to dance to some notes in order to emphasize others. (Although trying to catch every last note in a fast bando variation, say, like an insane dervish can be fun too).
8. Marking the changes in the music with changes in your dance. Music has a tendency to divide into sections, which are parts that sound different from each other (apologies for stating the obvious). One of the easiest ways to dance musically is to reflect that in your dance: when the music changes within a tango, you can change the way you dance by altering such things as your choice of vocabulary, quality of movement, amplitude of movement, amount of decoration, etc.
In all of this, for me, the follower’s musicality is at least as important as the leader’s and the musical interpretation is created together, as a couple, by listening not only to the music itself but to how you each hear it (which requires excellent somatic listening and communication skills from both parties). And led-and-followed moves and decorations and other solo movements are complementary ways of expressing the music.
This was originally published in Sugar Mountain Land. I’m republishing it here for my WordPress readers who prefer not to climb the saccharine slopes.
