My partner recently stumbled upon a short reflection I shared in one of my newsletters back in 2019. The reflection was about the beat, and its title (“From metronome to meditation”) is a good description of what still comes to mind for me when I think of this topic. But there are other aspects I’ve […] Read more…
One of the first classes I signed up for in college was Music Appreciation, and my professor was truly a gifted teacher. Every week he would bring his large collection of instruments to class and use them to demonstrate musical concepts that would have been abstract and disembodied otherwise. Words like timbre and tempo, major and minor, chord and cadence, […] Read more…
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…
In my recent article, Groovology 201: Groove as the Life Force of Music and Dance, I wrote that “Just as playing a groove – a repeating set of rhythms – doesn’t guarantee that the music will groove, executing a particular set of steps does not guarantee that a dance will emerge.” It is groove – the […] Read more…