I'm always curious about how the collective knowledge and wisdom of the global dance community can be harnessed to provide helpful answers and new insights in to topics related to dance.
Take the concept of "musicality." How could we tap into the range and breadth of experience that dancers, choreographers, writers, instructors, historians and others have about this concept in order to educate audiences and dancers about this idea as well as to present different definitions and perspectives? How could the end result of such crowdsourcing then help new audiences to concert dance better appreciate musicality? And how could social dancers learn to enhance their sense of musicality while on the dance floor?
Posts and Message Threads About "Musicality"
Before offering some suggestions about new possibilities for crowdsourcing musicality, I'd like to link to posts, message threads, articles and videos about musicality that cover different dance forms:
- If you search the Tango-L Mailing List for "musicality," you'll find a large number of excellent posts (490 with the term "musicality") about what musicality is and how tango dancers can develop their own sense of musicality.
- Johanna of Tangri-la blog has just written a very thoughtful and practical four-part series about tango technique, which includes a post dedicated to musicality.
- Alex of Alex.Tango.Fuego has just compiled a list of YouTube videos that show in very clear terms what is meant by musicality in Argentine Tango. Here's a video of Los Hermanos Macana dancing to Francisco Canaro's "Relíquias Porteñas":
- Don Baarns of The Unlikely Salsero wrote a new post about his teaching me how to hear the rhythm in Salsa and other social dance music. We had an excellent session last week. I think Don is a very good teacher and I particularly appreciate his very structured and incremental approach to education. (I'll update in the next couple of days the Google doc that I created to document my work with Don. Last week I wrote about my work with Don.) The second practice song we are working with is Michael McDonald's "Heard It Though the Grapevine":
Eighty percent of the choreography was composed of movements familiar to my own vocabulary, and yet the placing, timing, phrasing, musicality, grace, control, and sensitivity of the choreography and dancers awed me more than 30 consecutive fouettes ever could.
Maria always writes in a way that connects with me - I'll get to her mention of "musicality" in next section on crowdsourcing below.
Here are two clips from DVD of Mark Morris' Dido and Aeneas:
Paths to Crowdsourcing Musicality
How can the dance community--across all dance disciplines --build upon the examples above to create a deeper, richer understanding of musicality for dancegoers and dancers?
I think that the Tango-L list is an excellent example of crowdsourcing text-based content from the global tango community. But while there are many links to videos in their messages, a systematic method has not yet been created for organizing videos that relate to a specific topics.
So if we take the subject of musicality, it would be very helpful if we could create a system that showed relationships among different tango videos that highlight various aspects of musicality. We could start by building on the posts by Alex (videos that highlight tango musicality) and Johanna (musicality and musical expression post) to create a shared repository of interconnected knowledge and insight about this topic.
This video repository might take the form of a wiki, or a visualization tool that highlighted relationships among videos. Plus, video annotation tools such as Overlay.tv and Asterpix, that I discussed in last week's post, could be used to highlight musicality in specific sections of video clips. These highlighted video sections could then include embeddable links of their own so that viewers could link to related examples.
For example, take the video above of Los Hermanos Macana dancing to Francisco Canaro's "Relíquias Porteñas." If we wanted to really nail down the concept of musicality, it would be very helpful to be able to watch five couples dancing to this same Francisco Canaro tune and have written commentary by tango dancers as well explaining what they thought were the different approaches to musicality as portrayed in these clips.
This approach to capturing shared knowledge is very powerful and significantly shortens the amount of time it takes a person to acquire specific types of knowledge and insight.
The same types of crowdsourcing can be done for dancegoers who wish to have a better understanding of musicality as it relates to dance performances that they attend.
Sometimes dance writers and critics mention musicality as Maria did in her Mark Morris review. What I would like when I come across this term in a review is access to:
1) A video that highlights one or more specific sections of a performance that are especially good illustrations of what the author means by musicality, and
2) An interconnected library of videos that highlight the musicality of the specific dance company, and relates this sense of musicality (both similarities and differences) to videos of other dancers and dance companies.
This type of linked video gallery would provide a wealth of wisdom for both newcomers to dance and experienced audience members. It would often provide insights and perspectives to dance laypeople (dance audiences that are not writers, critics, academics, researchers, etc.) who would never be able to devote sufficient time to develop a rich understanding of musicality on their own.
Posted by Doug Fox on February 18, 2008 10:20 AM
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I think this entry addresses an important issue in dance. I have 20+ years of classical music training, and musicality in dance can be one of the greatest joys that I've experienced in a theater, as well as the most frustrating if a company or choreography doesn't have it. I believe musicality is of utmost importance in a dancer - look at the way we look up to Suzanne Farrell and her musicality on stage, as well as "musical" choreographers such as Balanchine and Mark Morris.
Given that, however, I feel like some choreographers' strengths are not in their musicality, but emphasize other aspects of dance, such as innovative choreography or interesting movements. Granted, musicality is not the end all and be all, but in my opinion, still extremely important.
I also found it interesting that people without a music background often find Mark Morris uninteresting, especially since he does not necessarily use technical athletic movements, but often utilizes simple walks, runs, and everyday movements. I know of at least a few people who found Morris' "Mozart Dances" extremely boring.
This is a wonderful endeavor! More power to you,.. and posters here!
One of the concepts that I am thinking about is concerning how movement rythm (as opposed to sound rhythm) is notated. I mean,.. the fact that the movement occurs BEFORE the accent/beat and 'finishes' on the beat,.. as opposed to the sound that 'starts' in the music and sounds AFTER that note 'hits'. Could it be that there may be a 'better' way to write movement rhythm?.. or is standard musical notation perfectly ideal ?
How are people considering 'musicality' that takes into account the distance the body parts have to travel,.. in relationship to the time-intervals available in certain rhythms?
Since 2005, Doug Fox's blog has covered the intersection of dance and the Internet. A primary focus is to help dancers and dance companies use the Internet and their dance videos for marketing, educational, creative and revenue-generation purposes.
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I think this entry addresses an important issue in dance. I have 20+ years of classical music training, and musicality in dance can be one of the greatest joys that I've experienced in a theater, as well as the most frustrating if a company or choreography doesn't have it. I believe musicality is of utmost importance in a dancer - look at the way we look up to Suzanne Farrell and her musicality on stage, as well as "musical" choreographers such as Balanchine and Mark Morris.
Given that, however, I feel like some choreographers' strengths are not in their musicality, but emphasize other aspects of dance, such as innovative choreography or interesting movements. Granted, musicality is not the end all and be all, but in my opinion, still extremely important.
I also found it interesting that people without a music background often find Mark Morris uninteresting, especially since he does not necessarily use technical athletic movements, but often utilizes simple walks, runs, and everyday movements. I know of at least a few people who found Morris' "Mozart Dances" extremely boring.