Dancing in music is an immersion experience. It’s not reducible to either conforming dance movements to beats of time or a layering a visual component on top of an audible score, although of course it can be both of these things.
Dancing in music is like swimming in a way that makes use of, or highlights the motion of the water. It’s not about staying within the strict lanes of a race or in fighting currents to reach a pre-set destination. Instead, it requires sensitive awareness of the swells and pulls of the water. You allow your body to go with the currents sometimes while maintaining the form of dance movement. You can also stop for rests, augment the motion with your own flourishes, choose to leap above it or dive down into it to the floor.
In tap dancer Savion Glover’s autobiography, Savion!: My Life in Tap, he describes hearing new dances rhythmically in his mind before composing them with his feet. He might hear something like “bam-ba-bam-ticka-ticka-ticka-boom-badaboom” (my words not his). His form of tap dancing is extremely close to percussive music-making – such as drumming – in this way. It’s the sounds that matter most – less so what the sounds look like as they are being produced.
I use this example to show how intimately dance and music can be connected.
For me, as for Savion, the desire to dance is usually inspired by sound (which could be imagined, like what he “hears” in his mind) rather than actual sound waves. It is inspired by rhythm, flow, stops and starts, ups, downs, sideways, spirals, clean or fuzzy endings, chords with other notes or actors, or single drops.
Controlling dance motion within music is where I found my greatest joy in dance. “Getting lost” in the music also helped me to manage the obsessive sorts of ruminations that I can be prone to and that harm my emotional health. Maintaining the formal requirements of the dance element required both a letting go of a kind and the sort of extreme focus of meditation. It wasn’t the sort of ecstatic dance where losing oneself was the goal. It was a surrendering within total awareness and self-possession. I know exactly where I am in the musical stream. I can punctuate it, withdraw from it, join with it, leave it, or follow it.
When the music is beautiful, especially when it is played live by a musician who exists in the same time and space as you do, there is a collaborative joining of expressive worlds. For this reason, dance is a bit impoverished when it is performed to pre-recorded, rather than live music. Half of the responsive, expressive duet has been eliminated. It’s like dancing with a broom rather than another person.
Would I have wanted to dance if music didn’t exist? If I didn’t love music first? I wonder about that. My first, unreflective thought is “no.” But then I remember Helen Keller, and those who “hear” in atypical ways. And then I think that there is a kind of music that is inside us. The same goes for dance.