How to Dance to the Music: Part Two

By Michelle

In the May/June 2003 edition of Zaghareet, I wrote an article called “How to Dance WITH the Music,” because I had seen so many students struggle with how to deliver an effective performance when they were unsure of how to break down their music. I recently received a letter from a dancer asking me to further explain what I meant by this phrase, beyond the technical aspect of breaking the music down into counts and phrases. I realized that reading how to listen to music is a bit of a challenge. It is difficult to talk about music without actually being able to hear examples and see demonstrations, isn’t it?

To recap that earlier article, I said that the most important element of a performance is your ability to hear—and as a result, allow the audience to see—the music. A dancer who does not hear her music I refer to as “dancing OVER the music,” which means that while her moves and technique might be flawless, they do not at all reflect the song she is dancing to. She could be dancing to any old piece of music instead of interpreting a specific song for the audience.

So how do you make sure that the audience is seeing the connection between the music and you?

When you first start to listen to your music, you’re probably just trying to decide if you like the piece or not. The tempo (speed of the music), the melody (the tune) and the overall emotion of the song will affect you. When you find that piece of music that speaks to your heart or your hips, listen to it over and over and over until you can sing it in your head—in other words, you know what is coming up next. This will be the biggest step in dancing WITH the music: simply knowing what it is going to do next.

Now sit down and play the song one more time. Analyze how the music makes you feel. Decide what you want your audience to see when you perform. Is the music fast paced? Perhaps you want to deliver a high-energy, friendly piece that shows your audience how much fun it is to dance. Perhaps the song is slow and you wish to deliver a contemplative statement that will allow the audience to see into your heart. This step of your music breakdown may come instantaneously. You may not need to spend more than a few minutes accomplishing the first two tasks (1—how the music makes you feel, and 2—what you want to say to your audience). Or, the music may be more complex and you really have to think about its impact on you and your impact on your audience.

Once you know your feelings and your message, then you get technical, breaking down the music as I indicated in the first article.

What happens most often when a dancer is dancing over the music is that since she doesn’t know her music inside and out, and has not decided what she wants to say in her dance, she will dance out of sync with it. For example, she may get stuck dancing to the drum backbeat in the song and completely miss the sweeping orchestration that is the main melody. Or she will not be prepared in her music and start a slow movement when the next phrase of the music is actually a fast section, or keep doing one successful combination right through a series of accents that breaks up two phrases in the song.

Each dancer hears different things in a piece of music. The fully orchestrated chorus of a song often tells me to travel around the stage. Drum accents to me sound like sharp down hips. Ney taqsims sound like floaty travelling steps accompanied by chest circles or snake arms. But to another dancer, she may hear the same sections and think “3/4 shimmies in place; 3-step-turns; full body undulations with leg vibration.” The point is, if you match YOUR movements to the music and change them when the music changes, then you will accurately reflect the music to your audience. What’s more, when you’re prepared to change your moves when the music changes, it will actually be easier to dance because the music will tell you what to do.

While in general I think it is important to know music’s technical terms (a topic for another article…), you do not need to know what 4/4 time refers to or what syncopation means as long as you understand the heart of the music. We don’t ask our audiences to know everything about belly dance, just to understand what we are saying to them when we move!

Farfesha Belly Dance © 2004