I'd been taking requests all morning at my line dancing class when I announced that we'd do the Special K Cha Cha: I reviewed the sequence of steps and selected Marc Anthony's I Need to Know on the CD player.
Highlands Senior Social:
Ahn, Paul, Barbara, Jean
This pic is not of the class
but of a line dance during the regular morning session.
It looks to me like we're at
Count #13 of The Electric Slide.
but of a line dance during the regular morning session.
It looks to me like we're at
Count #13 of The Electric Slide.
I love the dance, and I love the song. I love Marc Anthony's polyphonic composition and his precise performance. I enjoy dancing with the core of dancers who were on the floor with me at the moment: Nancy, Isabel, Barbara, Joyce. Others would join us but not yet. At the end of the number Isabel and Barbara were conferring on something:
"There are no hand movements," I said. "Do what ever seems natural."
(And Jim Clark, setting up his guitar amp for the ballroom band that would begin playing at 10, volunteered, "My utilities guy says, 'Do whatever spins the meter'.")
Whole Body
There isn't any part of Michael Jackson's body that wasn't part of the dance he accompanied his "singing" with. Every digit of every finger, his ears, his ear lobe, knew exactly where each sixteenth beat was. It would almost seem that simultaneously every follicle of his hair knew as well where each third of each beat was. Fred Astaire was in total command of his body and was wholly at one with the swing music: as Michael Jackson was one with the funk. And it isn't just dancers: back in the 1950s I loved to watch Horace Silver while I listened to his music. Different parts of his body pulsed with each of the several variations of the rhythm he was exploring. His left foot was tapping one rhythm while his right foot was beating another, his head was nodding with a different emphasis while his elbows made rude comments: all while playing the most unbelievable funky piano accompaniment to his band. Charlie Parker's drummer told of the immortal saxophonist demonstrating rhythmic independence for him. Bird took over the drum set, his alto sax still strung from his neck, and kicked a Charleston beat on the high hat, a Dixie beat on the bass drum, beat triplets on the snare drum with one stick while accenting quarter note triplets on the tom tom with the other. That's the sort of rhythmic juggling the saxophonist can do! Each digit is alive!
For line dancing the choreography may cover only the feet (the body necessarily following) but the dance welcomes the whole body, mind, and spirit.
If the women had been referring to the Special K, and liked what I was doing with my hands, good, let them do something similar: or something different. We're all dancing, all dancers. (And it helps if the body has natural resonance to music (and is trained into mastery of some of the subdivisions of time). We're not the Rockettes, identical in as many details as the Roxy Theater can control; we're free: within a prescription.
Let me narrate an analogy:
Analogy: Skiing
I didn't ski till I was twenty-two or -three. Once I skied I became mad for it. I injured myself almost instantly, but didn't stop. By my third trip I was skiing expert slopes with names like Hell Gate. But it was several years before I skied those expert slopes well: well enough so that lifetime racers at Tuckermans Ravine accepted me as one of them. I remember a watershed moment which transformed me from not-really expert to expert enough. My best ski buddies at Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine were instructors there. Hubbie was a German professor at Colby during the week and Herr Skimeister on the weekends. In all our time together Hubbie never "instructed" me in anything: till one day. He said he bet that if I cut a quarter of an inch off my ski poles it would help me get my weight forward for the pole plant. I did it. With my new shorter poles I made sure that each turn commenced with me coming forward to plant the pole tip right by the tip of my ski. It was magic. I was transformed. I instantly became a better balanced, more dynamic, more graceful skier! (And more courageous! (I was already far more daring than suited my wife (or my employer).))
Then I realized that the length of my poles had nothing to do with it; the essential point was I wasn't getting my weight far enough forward in initiating the turn. Skiing safety depends on turns, and turning depends on alternately weighting and un-weighting. The weighted ski resists turning; the unweighted ski finds resistance unnoticeable. As long as I returned my weight forward for each change of edges I was rescuing myself from the natural tendency (natural cowardice) that causes intermediates to hang "back" on steep slopes: putting sludge into their turns, and inviting overturning. No, no. You get on top of gravity. You ride it. You keep your upper body in the fall line: while you swish your skis from side to side, like windshield wipers. We fall off the saddle every time we lag. Suddenly, even on the steepest slopes, where it counts most, I was skiing with my whole body.
It's a paradox: where the danger is the greatest, you throw yourself into the danger: then you dominate it.
Same applies to dance. Same applies to everything.
Lesson
| No matter the steps, the part prescribed, the part your feet have to do and do in synch with the others – Dance with your whole body. Use your arms, your hands, your fingers – not just for balance, but to express the rhythm, the dance, the music, yourself! |
Meter, Rhythm
Meter is the predictable side of the rhythm. The dances that I do are all either common time of waltz time: either 4/4 or 3/4: four beats to a "measure" or three beats to a measure. The music that I love to listen to, sing, or play may be in 5/4 time, or 6/8 time, or 2/2 time, and I wish I did encounter dances in those times (in 6/8 time especially, I do love 6/8 time) (and maybe some dances, like the polka, are in 2/2 time); but trust me: the line dances I encounter and the ballroom dances at our social are basically 4/4, with the occasional waltz thrown in. That's meter: meter declares what the rhythmic regularity is; but it ain't music till it becomes irregular, unpredictable. That's the rhythm: the part that's different, a part that one may fall in love with.
I find I Need to Know to be rhythmically fabulous: salsa of the highest sophistication. But though I also love the Special K Cha Cha, there's one thing about the dance I find week: its juncture between choruses. I would like to see it re-choreographed with a better turn around.
Illustrations in specific line dances will follow below.
Juncture
My dance training consists of a two week course in the sixth grade, and some line dance participation in this my seventy-first year. I don't know if there are dance theorists who use either term; but they've got to have the concepts. I develop them by analogy from linguistics and from music. Juncture here is the border shared between two distinct things: like a sea shore; like the ending of chorus one and the beginning of chorus two ... Here's an example from linguistics: consider the phrase "night rates": now consider the word "nitrates." The phonemes are identical; yet in the one case we all clearly hear "two" "words"; while we hear one in the latter. The difference is one of juncture. "Night rates" separates the /t/ from the /r/; "nitrates" links them: blurs them.
I am not crazy about how the Special K cha cha recycles itself: how count #32 junctures against the next cycle starting with count #1. I think the juncture could be improved. Whereas I love some of the junctures we had just danced: Amos Moses, for example: of The Electric Slide. (Details may follow.)
Turn Around
"The turn around" is a musician's phrase: in jazz music, in pop music. Let's say you're playing a twelve bar blues. The song displays a harmonic and rhythmic pattern over twelve measures: that's the first chorus. When it's your chorus you play the same progression of chords, but your solo should "comment on" the melody; not just repeat the melody. (Miles regularly improvised counter melodies. That's why Bird was in love with the raw kid.) And no matter whose chorus it is, when the last two bars are arrived at, bars eleven and twelve, use chords that point at the final tonic chord; not the tonic chord itself. In other words, if the blues is in G, not only do you use a lot of 7ths (and maybe 9ths and 11ths and 13ths) (that's what makes it "far out"), your final measure will be G (or G7), the tonic, giving a sense of closure, of finality: but while cycling through the choruses you don't want it to close, you want to keep it open: so you substitute chords that "point at" G: Am7 / D7, for example. The Am7 / D7 chords turn the chorus back on itself: a final G will finish it.
Analogy: Writing
Here's a different analogy, from writing. Edgar Rice Burroughs ends a middle-of-the-novel chapter with Tarzan trapped in the pit with the lion: that keeps the narrative open, ongoing. Having him marry Jane is how Burroughs might close the last chapter: the end of the story.
Analogy: Ballroom
Analogy from ballroom dance: I dance a fox trot. I use my slow, slow, quick-quick step; I sense the tune ending: I put my partner into a spin: and we bow / curtsy to each other on the final beat. That's the tonic, the cadence, the closure: all before is ongoing: turn around.
Illustrations: Juncture
Line dances are all a given number of counts. The counts don't have to match the beats in the music. They typically don't. Pop music is often based in a sixteen measure pattern. the number of beats in a chorus is therefore four times sixteen = sixty-four. Line dances are typically sixteen beats, thirty-two beats, thirty-six beats ... It doesn't matter: 4/4 line dances will come out fine with 4/4 pop music. Never mind where the musicians' measure is; synch with the count of the dance.
I criticized the turn-around of the Special K ChaCha: I'll illustrate in a moment. First I'll set it up with an illustration of a turnaround, the juncture between repetition one and repetition another: in the line dance Amos Moses. Amos Moses is only eight counts. On 1 you place your right heel forward; on 2 you bring your right foot back beside your left, transferring your weight to your right foot. On 3 you place your left heel forward. On 4 you bring your left foot back with your right, but turn it one-quarter turn counter clockwise. If you started facing a north wall, you're now partly turned toward the west wall. On 5 you swing your hips square with the west wall as you bring your right foot into a step to your new right, the north wall. On 6 you step your left foot behind your right foot, a kind of a "vine" move to the right (north at the moment), transfer weight. On 7 you move your right foot further right (or north), but start to twist back clockwise (soon to face east), as on 8 your left foot follows your hips around to square with the east wall.
That's the "chorus": eight counts: eight counts with a quarter turn left and a half-the-hall turn right. You start out "north"; you end up east: after turning west: all in eight counts. But now here's the thing: you continue the dance. You recycle. Count #9 is a repetition of Count #1.
By itself, one 8-count cycle is cute. But you ain't seen nothin' yet. 5, 6, 7, 8 turns around into 1, 2, 3, 4. And the juncture is funky. Even a dancer with good balance will have a time maintaining an erect neutral posture from which to resume the right heel forward, right heel back, left heel forward, left foot turn ...
There a natural, an inevitable lag between your feet and your hips. Funky, man, move those hips. Come on girl, push that tush!
continues in a sec
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