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Going Across the Floor (primarily for my Playhouse students) · Jan 26, 07:14 AM

Briefly, where dance – a visual art – and music — aural — meet is in time – in that both art forms can be seen or heard as a way of measuring time. So when working together, it’s the confluences of time (timing) that we refer to in order to cooperate.

So for you, when there’s a six measure phrase (as we had last Friday), the first thing to do is to stop referring visually to what the other dancers ahead of you are doing (because they are most likely doing it ‘wrong’). In an ideal world you would instead feel, count, know where you were, in that maybe abstracted but none the less real world of passing time that we all inhabit.

However, in the student environment, you can lean on the musician a little more heavily. Transform your expectation of a visual cue into an audio craving. That is, if the music is phrased, then the ‘one’ of the phrase, and other salient points will be demarcated in sound, as the time alloted for each cycle of movement passes.

Eventually, hopefully in performance, music and movement can live in separate but parallel universes, as they both pass through the same time zone with their own emotional and expressive priorities that illuminate each others value — that is ‘cubing’ as it were, their shared expressive energy… but I digress to the future.

In short, dancers or movement artists, when studying, you sometimes have to remove yourselves from thinking visually and use your ears instead.

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