This is the sort of post I don’t do very often because I don’t feel very confident of my understanding of dance and movement. There are plenty of people who have a better grasp of these things than I do. And, at the end of the day, I’m of the opinion that no amount of talking or writing or reading about dancing will make you a better dancer. If you’re not actually dancing, you’re not going to improve or understand movement.
The thing that really shifted my dancing from casual interest to solid addiction was the way it required my switching off my brain. This was important to me because I was busy with an MA and then PhD, and spent most of my time in brain and not in my body. I think it also made me a better tutor for uni students – talk less, listen more. Dancing – particularly following, but also leading – really needs you to just tell your brain to shoosh and to get on with being in your body. Strangely enough, Jerry’s just linked up Ruby’s post ‘To note or not to note’ on FB and she asks some neat questions about the value of taking notes or writing and reading about dance. I think that you learn most about dancing from dancing, and from dancing with as many people as possible. I actually think I learn most about leading from dancing with total one-class beginner follows and from working on my own in front of a mirror, trying out all the movements (try all the movements).
But I did that private lesson the other week, I’ve been doing more partner dance work, I’ve done a spot of dance teaching (that whole talking less thing is pretty bloody useful) and an interesting post at Lindy Hop Variations for Followers has triggered some dance-thinking over here in obcon land. So here’s a big long post where I’m really just floating ideas that I’m mulling over at the moment. I’m probably way off base here, but whatevs. I’m a work in progress, right? Never stop learning and all.
One of the things I find most difficult to write or talk about is a definition of ‘swing’. I mean the musical ‘feel’ of a song. Gunther Schuller has all that stuff about vertical and horizontal distances, but that’s really confusing and not entirely useful when you’re looking for a quick, simple image. I’ve often heard people talk about it in terms of a ‘delay’, and I think about it as being chillaxed, not racing towards the next beat, but hanging back and waiting til the very last moment before moving on to the next beat. But that’s not really all that helpful when you’re explaining how a swinging rhythm really works.
When I’m moving my body – dancing, I guess – to swinging music, the timing feels different to when I’m just listening to it. I feel that the ‘bounce’ (or some people call it pulse these days) is the heart of that swinging rhythm. A good, swinging late 1930s song at about 180bpm really feels as though it’s bouncing along. It’s not a jagged up-down timing, but more an arc through the air. I’ve just been reading through some research notes, looking for an article about black bands in the early days of radio and came across this comment about the work song:
The function of this song is to facilitate the task of chopping wood. As is typical of Afro-American work songs, in this song the process of chopping the wood becomes an intrinsic part of the music. The sound produced by the ax creates a component of the music which is essential to the structure of the song. The music, then, is not simply accompanying the work, the work becomes the music, and the music becomes the work. (Olly Wilson, ‘Black Music as an Art Form’ in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed Robert G. O’Meally, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998:91).
I’ve just found this cool video of R.L.Burnside chopping wood in 1978
For me, this idea of rhythm as part of movement is really important to how I think about swinging rhythms. I tend to think about the beat in this type of song as being like the swing of an axe or a hammer. The upwards lift is quicker and stronger, but the downwards arc is a longer, slower force, directed by gravity. Each downwards arc moves at the same pace (because that’s how gravity works), but we can control both the upwards and downwards movement (I have just gone and watched a million videos of people chopping wood. I am such a nerd).
I think my thinking about dance is mostly informed by my interest in 1930s and 40s lindy hop, by Frankie Manning and by the Hot Shots. Whether I’ve actually understood the things they’ve been trying to teach me is another matter. When I think about ‘bounce’ (or pulse – whatevs), I think of each step or each bounce as a sink into the ground (ie sinking my hips down, with my knees bending, my ankles bending, and my arse going out and back to allow a deeper bend), and then a pushing up from the floor as I step onto the other foot, always keeping a bit of bend in the knee rather than locking it. This means my knees – my legs – are like coiled springs containing stored energy which I use for each step, or for faster reactions. These days I’m figuring out that my arse is actually the most important part of this ‘stored energy’ thing, and that I need to stop working my calves so hard. In a bounce, the movement starts in my ‘core’ (or my guts, or my hips or that network of muscles and things around the lower part of my torso. or my arse.) The depth of the bounce really depends on how much ‘time’ I have – faster songs mean less time.
So my bounce is kind of the same as an axe rising and falling. My muscles engage as I sink, or as the axe is raised, and then the energy is let out or used as I step or the axe falls.
I’m not sure of the physics of it all. The important part for me is that there’s that inevitable, undeniable delay. You can’t change the way gravity works. You can’t fight the swing in a swinging rhythm. This is why I think you need to have bounce or pulse when you lindy hop. You might crunch that bounce up until it’s like a tiny, power-bounce, right in your core and hard to see. But you need that little compression-and-release to dance.
If you’re not bouncing, you’re just walking. And even walking has bounce, if you’re relaxed, your core’s engaged and you’re bending your knees. You get a greater range of movement in your upper body (eg the swing of your arms, or a rotation at the waist) if you’re bent a little at the hips, you push from the arse/core and you let gravity move your arms about (rather than tightening them up). This bend at the hips (not sticking your arse out, but bending at the hips, so your back stays straight) engages your core muscles (eg your back, abs, sides, etc). Bending your knees engages your core muscles, especially if your weight is on the ball of your foot. It’s hard to do this if you don’t have your weight on the ball of your foot. It’s even harder if you keep your legs really straight and your knees locked. Also: ow.
I also think that if you don’t bounce, your timing is off. It always feels as though you’re rushing. I hate following a lead without bounce, as I always feel as though I have to run to get anywhere, particularly if they take huge steps. And if they’re really tight through the shoulders and I can’t feel where their weight is, or where it’s going. I also find that a natural consequence of bounce is less tension in the upper body. I don’t know why, but I always wonder if it’s because your lower muscles are doing the big job of keeping you upright and balanced, so you upper body can get on with doing crazy shit. Like throwing and catching a basketball. Or swinging an axe. And less unnecessary muscle tension means your body is doing less work and there’s less fatigue. And following or leading you is much nicer.
All that stuff about bounce is nice, because to me that’s how you make the swing in the music visible. But, really, I like that little discussion of work songs for the way it illustrates how rhythmic movement is incorporated into vernacular music and dance. Or the way everyday dance and music is about everyday movements and rhythms.
One of the things I’m most interested in at the moment, as a DJ, is how dancers ‘hear’ the beat, even when there isn’t an instrument banging it out. I’ve always had trouble with the way dancers in class speed up if you get them to do a basic rhythm without music. It’s something to do with the way hoomans in a group work – they speed up basic rhythms. But it drives me nuts. It’s as though they let the rhythm outside inflect the rhythm inside their bodies. Yet this idea of shared, increasing rhythm is partly what makes social dancing so much fun – we ‘catch’ rhythm from other people on the floor, and that shared feeling of rhythm kind of echoes and bounces back and forth, exaggerating the feeling. And that’s fun to work with, as a DJ, increasing and decreasing that shared musical feeling.
But the more experienced a dancer, the more likely they are to be able to feel a consistent beat, no matter what’s happening around them on the dance floor. I’ve noticed that newer dancers tend to have trouble with instrumentally sparse songs. Acapella can be the hardest, but small vocal groups with a guitar (eg Cats and the Fiddle) can be just as hard. And the most accessible and easiest to work with is a large band with a big rhythm section. Conversely, bands with choruses where instruments are doing different rhythms and melodies at once can be really confusing for new dancers.
You can see this when dancers are listening to a song with lots of breaks. Total beginners have real trouble predicting the beats and then coming back in on time. Dancers with some experience but without a real empathy for the music have difficulty doing anything other than standing still during the breaks – they can’t feel the rhythm continuing in the ‘silence’. And more experienced dancers with a sense of the broader structures of a song as well as the basic beat are most capable of adding in rhythms during that break (or of just riding out the break as a quiet point of contrast). Most interesting of all, if a dancer has bounce, then they’re never really standing still, even during breaks, unless they consciously choose to stop bouncing. And isn’t that the point – that we are dancing, not creating a series of tableaus?
So I’m pro-bounce. Because that’s what’s in swinging music. But I’m also for managing bounce to respond to music appropriately. Here, really, it’s not my business to tell other people what to do with their bodies. Dance how you like, how you feel. But for me, it’s fascinating to explore how bounce works in relation to music, and then – even more fascinatingly – how I can manage my bounce when I’m following a lead who doesn’t bounce. Do I abandon it completely? (NO!) Do I moderate it so as not to interrupt the lead? (YES!) The depth and feel of bounce can be a really simple way of responding to the intensity of the music. Big emotional, exciting moment – big bounce.
And, finally, I know I’ve been dancing with a badass, bouncy lindy hopper, because my heart rate is way up and I’m sweating rivers. Bounce simply takes more energy, and turns a low impact slouch-around-the-floor into a serious aerobic workout, engaging all your muscles and kicking your arse. A bouncing lindy hopper simply has a more energised set of muscles, which you can see in their dancing. And that’s the difference between dancing lindy hop and just standing about, right? You’re kicking your own arse and riding the adrenaline to funtown!
