Who Needs a Beat When
Your Feet Just Go?
The idea to do a project
on how reliant dance is on music came for me when I was watching the film Amadeus. There was a scene in which
Mozart was tasked with the project of creating an opera for the Emperor but was
unable to do a specific scene because the emperor had banned something along
the lines of not being able to sing and dance in the same scene. This forced
Mozart to do the scene with no music, which resulted in a very awkward scene.
This got me thinking about how much music dictates dance and how much the beat
controls the way you move.
To study this, I planned
on having my friend improv a dance to a song. I had her do this to show how she
was able to dance well to a song because she was able to move with the beat of
the song. I then was planning on moving the music resulting in the music being
off from the dance. When I went to do this part I decided to just repeat the
dance on the second half of the song but to my surprise, the same dance still
looked good on a part of the song she did even dance to. I then realized that
even though most of the song had changed, the beat was still the same resulting
in the dance to match up perfectly. Since this worked out I decided to keep it.
I thought this was really interesting because I felt it furthered my hypothesis
even more than my original idea because it showed that all a dancer needs is a
beat and they are able to move their feet. It also was interesting to see how
my friend was able to completely improv a dance to a song just by moving with
the beat. Even though she is a dance major, I have had a similar experience to
this where I have no dance history but often find myself dancing to music I have
never heard before but am able to move to the beat.
What inspired me about
McCloud’s comic was how he explained the history and evolution of comics. This
lead me to think of the history of dance and how music has always been a factor
of it. Even though music and dance have both evolved so much, dance is still
very dependent upon the beat.
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