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Thread: Musicality

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by ChrisB View Post
    Surely by definition something with less rules has more scope for expression and improvisation
    Quote Originally Posted by bigdjiver View Post


    If you are not obeying the rules of something you are doing something else.

    Guys, this is just not true, especially the first comment. It might seem obvious enough to warrant whistling, but if you actually think about it it's not true by definition.

    Think about a non-dance related legal example. There exists a rule that says a little bit of paper with the Queen's face on it can be exchanged for goods, services etc. If we ignore this rule we would not be able to buy anything, and our options would be limited. Sure, we could exist with it, but the point is that that particular rule allows effective co-operation.

    Ok, now the dance example. Let's say we ignore the rule that the follower has to have tension in their arms. Now we can't get them to move where we want them to, and our options would be limited. Note that we can still do crazy, wacky movements of self expression, but we cannot co-operate effectively.

    Seeing as we are discussing partner dancing, where co-operation is an important aspect, you'd have thought the need for rules would be apparent, obviously not .

    The lack of rules is directly related to the level of anarchy. People sometimes think that life would be easier without so many legal rules (aka laws), this mistakes anarchy with freedom. It is exactly the same with dance - we need rules to co-operate, this shared knowledge of what is permissible allows self expression.

    I hope this helps.

    Dan

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    Re: Musicality

    With these WCS rules and breaking them thing, I can't make up my mind whether my style of MJ dancing makes me a really bad WCS dancer, or truly advanced.

    (I'll go with the former unless I get invited to teach at Blaze or Southport next year. )
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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by ducasi View Post
    With these WCS rules and breaking them thing, I can't make up my mind whether my style of MJ dancing makes me a really bad WCS dancer, or truly advanced.

    (I'll go with the former unless I get invited to teach at Blaze or Southport next year. )
    FWIW I'd personally say that, in the context of 'dancing', you'd be advanced, however, I guess that in the context of 'MJ' ... you'd be out of context!!!! Because all the rules are being broken! [or extended or reinvented, perhaps, depending on perspective!!].

    To my mind, learning a new skill, especially one involving creativity needs rules (or guidelines, as would be my preferred term).

    My goal is to extend myself my breaking (or perhaps going beyond) the rules. In order to do this effectively, I need to know and have learned these rules inside out, and even then, I'll make mistakes and come to grief!! All part of the rich pattern!!

    I will always applaud the like of Marc F and Amir who are (seemingly) constantly pushing the boundaries, allowing us (me in particular) mere mortals to follow their blazed trail!

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by gebandemuishond View Post
    Guys, this is just not true, especially the first comment. It might seem obvious enough to warrant whistling, but if you actually think about it it's not true by definition.

    Think about a non-dance related legal example. There exists a rule that says a little bit of paper with the Queen's face on it can be exchanged for goods, services etc. If we ignore this rule we would not be able to buy anything, and our options would be limited. Sure, we could exist with it, but the point is that that particular rule allows effective co-operation.

    Ok, now the dance example. Let's say we ignore the rule that the follower has to have tension in their arms. Now we can't get them to move where we want them to, and our options would be limited. Note that we can still do crazy, wacky movements of self expression, but we cannot co-operate effectively.

    Seeing as we are discussing partner dancing, where co-operation is an important aspect, you'd have thought the need for rules would be apparent, obviously not .

    The lack of rules is directly related to the level of anarchy. People sometimes think that life would be easier without so many legal rules (aka laws), this mistakes anarchy with freedom. It is exactly the same with dance - we need rules to co-operate, this shared knowledge of what is permissible allows self expression.

    I hope this helps.

    Dan
    The statement was true. What you've talked about is the need for rules to function and thats entirely different. It holds that you have more choice without them. The obvious question is where you draw the line. Some of the most important discoveries were made by breaking rules that everyone else took as writ. MJ gives you just enough structure to partner dance successfully and after that feels largely guidelined for beginner encouragement and more open to experimentation as you progress. I don't see how any increased structure beyond that gives rise to more expression; quite the opposite.

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by gebandemuishond View Post
    Guys, this is just not true, especially the first comment. It might seem obvious enough to warrant whistling, but if you actually think about it it's not true by definition.
    Let's think about another artistic medium: painting. The techniques of holding a brush, making a mark on the paper, how to mix paints and express yourself are common to all "styles" of painting. Now let's insert some rules - you can only paint with this brush. You can only use these colours. You can only paint on a designated area of the canvas. You can only paint with linear strokes.

    Does painting with these rules allow as much freedom of expression as without them? No doubt that great masterpieces can be created within the rules. And that in order to develop techniques and practice you impose strict rules upon yourself. But when moving as the muse takes you, the 'rules' become barriers - how ethereal they are depends on how strict they were to begin with and the skill you have in passing through them.

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by Gadget View Post
    Let's think about another artistic medium: painting.
    Painting is a solo activity. geband's entire point, which you seem to have missed, is that partner dancing is a partnered activity that requires co-operation. So, no, let's not think about painting. Let's think about artistic mediums that require co-operation.

    Quote Originally Posted by ChrisB View Post
    MJ gives you just enough structure to partner dance successfully
    I understand that contact improv has less structure, though I haven't danced that.

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by Gadget View Post

    Does painting with these rules allow as much freedom of expression as without them?
    No but there are certain rules which are fundamental

    Using your analogy... when teaching someone to paint in Watercolour, you'd probably say the rule is to paint using the lightest colours first... (well in my experience, that's what i've been taught)

    We know you can break this rule but when starting out, its probably one of the fundamental things your teacher would tell you to do
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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by MartinHarper View Post
    Painting is a solo activity. geband's entire point, which you seem to have missed, is that partner dancing is a partnered activity that requires co-operation. So, no, let's not think about painting. Let's think about artistic mediums that require co-operation.
    I don't think it really makes a massive amount of difference, they both require some degree of fundamental rules to begin (although as I say what might seem necessary today may not be tomorrow). Its just how many you define, WCS has some which appear to lend themselves to increased musicality in the early stages but to say that MJ is less so as a whole is incorrect as you have less boundaries.

    Quote Originally Posted by MartinHarper View Post
    I understand that contact improv has less structure, though I haven't danced that.
    Looks interesting

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by MartinHarper View Post
    Painting is a solo activity. geband's entire point, which you seem to have missed, is that partner dancing is a partnered activity that requires co-operation. So, no, let's not think about painting. Let's think about artistic mediums that require co-operation.
    But I have a magic paintbrush in my hands that I paint a picture of movement with to reflect the music. I frame the shapes they create, I feel how they react and move with them to get the best out of that brush. When immersed in the creation, nothing exists outside of the picture that is being generated by artist and brush moving in unison.

    Yes, it's a partnership, but it's a lead and follow partnership: The 'brush' may dictate what sort of picture you can create with it; you can paint the same thing with different brushes and get different pictures. But it's dance - a magical world where the sparkly pixie dust lets the brush trail beautiful swirls and curves over the painting, smoothing out your rough edges and adding in details to create a masterpiece.

    Let's keep thinking on painting: there are 'rules' like thirds, golden triangles, Fibonacci sequence, colour balance, that can make your painting be more... pleasurable. But they are not "rules"... more "guidelines" really... Like hitting breaks and 'closing' a song.


    I understand that contact improv has less structure, though I haven't danced that.
    looks cool Very similar to Lucky & Ruby's "senses" workshop. Don't know if I could handle this bit though....
    "As CI employs lifts, falls, and acrobatic movements, it requires essential skills and techniques for keen body awareness, collaboration with a partner, strength, flexibility and alertness."
    ...hmmm.... falls.... there are arials and lifts, perhaps "falls" are an avenue that has not been fully explored in MJ... well, controlled descents anyway

    {edit:}
    Contact Improvisation UK - UK ongoing
    There are classes in Glasgow and Edinburgh... pity it doesn't list any up here. Anyone been to any?
    Last edited by Gadget; 23rd-May-2008 at 01:38 PM.

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by Gadget View Post
    But I have a magic paintbrush in my hands that I paint a picture of movement with to reflect the music. I frame the shapes they create, I feel how they react and move with them to get the best out of that brush. When immersed in the creation, nothing exists outside of the picture that is being generated by artist and brush moving in unison.

    it's dance - a magical world where the sparkly pixie dust lets the brush trail beautiful swirls and curves over the painting, smoothing out your rough edges and adding in details to create a masterpiece.
    This reminded me of a description of a woman dancing solo to a live band of musicians.

    After a while, the musicians found that they were playing their instruments to keep up with her dancing. She was leading them!

    Her dance had metoporhised from her dancing to the musicians to the musicians following her dance lead.

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by MartinHarper View Post
    Painting is a solo activity. geband's entire point, which you seem to have missed, is that partner dancing is a partnered activity that requires co-operation. So, no, let's not think about painting. Let's think about artistic mediums that require co-operation.
    I'm glad I wasn't talking to the air!

    Quote Originally Posted by Gadget View Post
    But I have a magic paintbrush in my hands that I paint a picture of movement with to reflect the music. I frame the shapes they create, I feel how they react and move with them to get the best out of that brush. When immersed in the creation, nothing exists outside of the picture that is being generated by artist and brush moving in unison.

    Yes, it's a partnership, but it's a lead and follow partnership: The 'brush' may dictate what sort of picture you can create with it; you can paint the same thing with different brushes and get different pictures. But it's dance - a magical world where the sparkly pixie dust lets the brush trail beautiful swirls and curves over the painting, smoothing out your rough edges and adding in details to create a masterpiece.

    Let's keep thinking on painting: there are 'rules' like thirds, golden triangles, Fibonacci sequence, colour balance, that can make your painting be more... pleasurable. But they are not "rules"... more "guidelines" really... Like hitting breaks and 'closing' a song.
    Magic paintbrush? Immersed in the creation? Framing shapes? What sort of fantasy world is this? Yeah ok, it's dance we're talking about, there's bound to be a bit of pretentious imagery involved in any discussion, but my word... that really takes the biscuit.

    From reading that you obviously consider yourself to be God's gift to dance, after all you can make your partner sink into a blissful nirvana of swirling movement and intoxicating music etc. In which case the rest of us mere mortals must continue to stomp around clumsily dreaming of the day we might own a magic paintbrush...

    I sincerely apologise if I'm being rude and missed something or didn't get the joke

    Dan

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by Gadget View Post
    I have a magic paintbrush in my hands that I paint a picture of movement with to reflect the music.
    Let's think about artistic mediums that require co-operation and exist outside of Gadget's fevered imagination.

    Quote Originally Posted by ChrisB View Post
    I don't think it really makes a massive amount of difference.
    There's plenty of difference between dancing with an intelligent person, and painting with an inanimate object. The inanimate object has no creative input. The intelligent person does. Coordinating the creative input of two or more intelligent people requires communication. Communication requires common ground in the form of rules, guidelines, and conventions.

    This means that in partner dancing, rules and suchlike both increase and decrease scope for expression and improvisation.

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by MartinHarper View Post
    This means that in partner dancing, rules and suchlike both increase and decrease scope for expression and improvisation.


    This is a really important point in my opinion. I think MJ drifts too much to the "no rules" side of things to allow for easy communication and by extension musicality.

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by MartinHarper View Post
    I don't think it really makes a massive amount of difference.

    There's plenty of difference between dancing with an intelligent person, and painting with an inanimate object. The inanimate object has no creative input. The intelligent person does. Coordinating the creative input of two or more intelligent people requires communication. Communication requires common ground in the form of rules, guidelines, and conventions.

    This means that in partner dancing, rules and suchlike both increase and decrease scope for expression and improvisation.
    Allow me to return to the context if I may. "I don't think it really makes a massive amount of difference, they both require some degree of fundamental rules to begin"

    They are no different in so much as they require rules. The rules of partnered activity include those that focus on coordination but ultimately they're still just rules; it's the same principal. They can make communication easier and less ambiguous by enforced slot dancing for example. But if it isn't completely necessary and the dancers can function together without it, they have a boundary enforced upon them. We know that we can dance together out of slot so it can't strictly be required. Now that isn't an attack upon it, that structure brings with it it's own positives, but having more free reign has to bring with it more scope.

    I'm sure most are on a very similar page, its just each persons individual interpretation of what a rule brings to the dance. But as StokeBloke mentioned in another thread recently, being musical is simply being musical. And as something which gives you slightly more freedom to apply it, any conclusions towards MJ not being are illogical.
    Last edited by ChrisB; 24th-May-2008 at 10:05 AM. Reason: changing quote

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by gebandemuishond View Post
    Magic paintbrush? Immersed in the creation? Framing shapes? What sort of fantasy world is this? Yeah ok, it's dance we're talking about, there's bound to be a bit of pretentious imagery involved in any discussion, but my word... that really takes the biscuit.

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by MartinHarper View Post
    Let's think about artistic mediums that require co-operation and exist outside of Gadget's fevered imagination.
    Which he has every right to, and, quite frankly, good for him! I will always applaud, full heartedly, all manner of creative expression (which, of course, must be imaged, or mentally created before it can ever be physically created - created in the physical world)

    Quote Originally Posted by MartinHarper View Post
    ... The inanimate object has no creative input. The intelligent person does. ...
    Yes and not necessarily. Plenty of the intelligent (or maybe academically educated) have severely constricted creativity.

    Whereas the uneducated may well be quite creative, but not intelligently (necessarily)!!

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by Lory View Post
    No but there are certain rules which are fundamental

    Using your analogy... when teaching someone to paint in Watercolour, you'd probably say the rule is to paint using the lightest colours first... (well in my experience, that's what i've been taught)

    We know you can break this rule but when starting out, its probably one of the fundamental things your teacher would tell you to do
    My first reaction to this thread was a drawing analogy. There is nothing as free as a blank canvas.
    I was playing with GIMP, and open source (free) paint program. If I so desire I couldpaint pixel by pixel (dot by dot) and every dot could be one of millions of colours and shades. That would seem to be the ultimate freedom of expresion. However it would be excrutiatingly burdensome to paint like that.

    In instead it is much easier to paint using rules like there is a straight line joining this pixel to that pixel, it is so wide, and has such and such a colour. Here there is a circle of this colour. Having these rules, and the freedom to abandon them, gives much more freedom of expression within a limited time-scale. The more tools you know how to use the more able you are to express yourself if not exactly freely, at a much reduced cost in time and effort.

    The same must apply to a lead and follow dance. Each dance form gives us a different tool-box, and each of those tool boxes are optimised for a different form of expression. One may be for water colours, another for oils, another for engineering drawings.

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by Magic Hans View Post
    Yes and not necessarily. Plenty of the intelligent (or maybe academically educated) have severely constricted creativity.

    Whereas the uneducated may well be quite creative, but not intelligently (necessarily)!!
    However, anyone capable of choosing between two shirts to wear in the morning is more creative than an inanimate paintbrush.... which is the point.

    Quote Originally Posted by Bigdjiver
    The same must apply to a lead and follow dance. Each dance form gives us a different tool-box, and each of those tool boxes are optimised for a different form of expression. One may be for water colours, another for oils, another for engineering drawings.
    Alternatively, they may not be even close to optimized for anything......

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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by MartinHarper View Post
    Painting is a solo activity. geband's entire point, which you seem to have missed, is that partner dancing is a partnered activity that requires co-operation. So, no, let's not think about painting. Let's think about artistic mediums that require co-operation.


    I see the rules as enabling one another to communicate effectively with each other ..

    Someone might be a brilliant poet but you have to be able to speak the same language to appreciate them!
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    Re: Musicality

    Quote Originally Posted by gebandemuishond View Post
    I sincerely apologise if I'm being rude and missed something or didn't get the joke
    I just don't think you have has as broad an imagination as mine: I have an imagination. I like to paint. There are many times when I have been so lost and focused on one thing that time disappears and I wonder why I'm hungry when it's only been ten mins... to find that it's been hours.

    When dancing I try to have the same focus. I like watching dancers and I like the "shapes" that they make and curves of movement they form. I like to 'draw' shapes and forms when dancing: it's these I find attractive and hold my interest. I am not claiming I am any good at it, but if it's in my head and I am trying to do this, then it's more likely to come out than if it's not.

    "Framing shapes". It was once put to me that the lead is a frame to show the follower to their best. If the follower is creating shapes and patterns within the dance, then my "job" is to complement them; to place them for maximum aesthetic appeal; to give them a framework to be creative within.

    We use physical descriptions to describe audio perceptions within music: sharp, flat, smooth, rounded, impact,... is it much of a leap of imagination to convert physical descriptions into physical actions/movements? If the voice is rising, can't the dancer's also rise? If it's soft, can't the dance be soft? Isn't this what we are trying to do when adding in "musicality"?

    From reading that you obviously consider yourself to be God's gift to dance, after all you can make your partner sink into a blissful nirvana of swirling movement and intoxicating music etc. In which case the rest of us mere mortals must continue to stomp around clumsily dreaming of the day we might own a magic paintbrush...
    If you knew my perception of "god", yes. But I'm not the only god - you are one too. Some people choose to simply lead without acknowledging the input of the follower. Some do it rather well and create beautiful dances. Until you acknowledge the sprinkling of fairy dust that makes the brush move on it's own, there is little magic in your dancing. The connection is the magic. Just because the people holding the paintbrush can't see the magic within it, doesn't mean it's not a magic paintbrush.

    I would like to think that dancing could be a nirvana... but I'm sure that it's closer to smelling like teen spirit than Elysium Fields.

    Yes, there is cooperation. Yes, there is sharing. Yes, you have a partner. But it is a lead and follow dance. The roles are not the same. The lead is dominant. The lead creates the picture and the follower colours it in.
    I'm sure that there could be a dance form where the roles are truly shared, equally; but it's not any form of partner dance I know of.

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