In partner dancing we commit to gathering our senses around the music and moving together. This is the beauty of our art. But with the goal of a shared dance, the ability to groove solo is often overlooked in favor of partnering skills and movement technique. Of course these are essential, but to find a […] Read more…
Tango Immigrant’s recent post, Musicality: Description or Empathy?, reminded me of some thoughts I’ve been wanting to share in the ongoing debate about Mickey Mousing and musicality. Mickey Mousing, Tango Immigrant reminds us, means “mimicking the music while dancing, but in a superficial and automatised way.” In Simba Tango’s 2010 post on the topic, she describes how the term Mickey Mousing […] Read more…
For quite a while now I’ve been wanting to respond to the argument that being familiar with a song or a partner reduces the improvisational quality of the dance. Here is an actual quote from someone who made this argument: “Knowing music pieces by heart goes against improvisation. Improvisation would be dancing to an unknown […] Read more…
Quite often I hear comments equating the lack of an improvisational quality in someone’s dancing with “doing choreography.” When someone says this, they don’t mean that the dancer has planned the entire dance movement by movement in advance. What they usually mean is that the figures they’ve learned are being repeated without connecting them to, […] Read more…
“To find new things, take the path you took yesterday.” – John Burroughs In my series on musicality, I described improvisation as one of the five elements that comprises musicality. I defined improvisation as the process that brings life to the other four elements (our creative, emotional, somatic, and relational impulses) by following the invitation […] Read more…