There are performance standards that dancers must live up to in order to dance in a way that falls within the boundaries of a certain dance genre or practice. One is not “doing ballet”, for example, if one does not make use the steps, positions, and movements that are part of what counts a ballet, culturally speaking. Ballet can be expanded over time to include new movements but these are few and far between, occurring slowly over time. This is much the same as how a formal language works and develops, with new words being added to the vernacular and to the official dictionaries each year.
This blog post, for example, is in English. If I wrote “yutrap” this word I just made up and that a quick web search told me is not part of another formal language, I would need to incorporate it in some way that made their meaning intelligible to English-language readers. I could do this, for example, either by definition or by context. By definition, I could write, “by yuptrap I mean the trap I set for a garden mouse under a Yew tree.” I could write something, for example, like “Stella and Zelda set a yutrap for the mouse that lived in the garden,” using the part of the word that is like English (trap) to help with the meaning.
Similarly, I could extend and develop a ballet arabesque as part of composing a dance, and this might deviate from standard classical ballet vocabulary but it might be accepted as a variation on an arabesque, done for artistic or aesthetic reasons. If my variation was repeated enough, it might become part of a new style, much in the same way that George Balanchine created the new style of classical ballet which came to be known as neoclassical ballet with his expressive innovations on ballet timing and positions.
This true not just for formal dance forms like ballet but for other kinds of dance as well, including those that have “freestyle” components. Not all movements in hip hop dance, for example, count as hip hop, even if they are “freely” created. Hip hop has a vocabulary of movements, such as bounce, locking or popping for example, and it also has expressive standards for styles like breaking (B-boying) or krumping.
Just like there are some languages, like Mandarin Chinese or Thai, where pitch or tone matters to meaning, the wrong pitch or tone in dance can take it outside of the confines of the standards for that dance genre. Ballet is characterized by a fluid expressive tone, for example, one where movements ebb and flow into one another, as in classical music. For hip hop, expressive tone and rhythms matter even more for its meaning and location in one style or another.
Dance, like language, can be off-tone (I am refraining from using the term tone deaf intentionally so as not to myself by off-tone when writing for people who may include those without hearing). And when it is, the effects can be excruciating, particularly for dance experts who are highly trained to see and feel minute differences that make a difference. In my view, this is what went wrong with Ray Gun’s performance in the 1994 Paris Olympics in the hip hop category which led to her score of zero. She stepped so outside of the boundaries of hip hop in both technique and style that it didn’t even count as hip hop.
The problem for new dancers is that much of the tonal standards are implicit and tacit, much like many “rules” of social grace and behavior. One has to listen, watch, and observe with sensitivity to how people (or dancers) who are trained in the genre at issue are behaving. Then learn and comply before declaring oneself to be an innovator in the field. As George Balanchine once said, “you must know the rules before you can break the rules.”
Copyright © Aili Whalen 2025. All rights reserved.
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