It’s a balmy July Sunday, and I’m at a bit of a loose end – as is often the experience for people spending summer in the city, the place feels a little empty; the long drowsy days simply pass by in a lethargic saunter. 

I notice a poster for a free event in Tanssin Talo, “Music and Dance”, it’s starting in the better part of an hour, on a whim I decide to go and check it out.

Dance and music share a basic process of creation and perception: both are generated by, and experienced as, movement. Movements can develop in different ways – as sonic, visible, tactile, or kinesthetic phenomena – and can trigger and interact with other forms of movement, corresponding to them, and at times converging or diverging from them. Dance is generally thought of as visible and tangible bodily movement while music is considered primarily sonic, though, in reality, visible, kinetic, and sonic movements overlap.¹

Truly what captured me was my already long standing fascination with movement and music. As a musician, I feel the absolute necessity to literally absorb the music I am playing into the body, I mean, this is much of what practice is (for me); it is the “embodying” of music. Especially in the often stiff and monochromatic presentation of classical music (i.e. black dots on white paper) one always pushes to find the essence of a score through this kind of physical practice. 

In other musics, this isn’t as big a problem; folk music (irrelevant of culture) – which emerges more times than not with an intertwined dance tradition – is often learned aurally, and thus the practice is perhaps more similar to a contemporary dancer’s work. In that, the “score” is passed from one human to another directly without sifting through a filter like a notational form, an engraving computer program or even centuries of habits, rules and short-hands on which paper scores are understood.

In any case, we cannot state with certainty that music and dance are “similar but distinct phenomena” as Judith Lynne Hanna (1982:68) does, but rather that they are overlapping and sometimes inseparably interrelated. Therefore, we are suggesting an approach that avoids a priori categorisations by studying body movement and sound rather than music and dance.²

Now, in defense of scores, I will say that this filtering process is also one I enjoy; this is a facet of classical music that can be more interpretive and less mimetic than other ways of transferring music. The score allows us to do all these procedures of embodying the music as part of our own process, and it gives us a field on which to try out things, practice tiny little things and of course  repeat stuff. 

For dancers, there also exists a “paper-based” score making tradition, or many rather. Labanotation for example is perhaps the most detailed. It’s a cornucopia of semi-scientific symbols whose authority on details are even greater than that of the most complex musical scores. 

In my experience of working with contemporary dancers (mostly in Finland), one doesn’t at all feel this burden of a score or an authority of reproducing gesture exactly; each project (to my knowledge) is a one-off new creation that constitutes of the choreographers own habits and practice. Hence, the classical musician feels once again as the more “authoratarian” figure, following precise orders from the page.

Keeping this in mind, the tricky thing with juxtaposing contemporary classical and contemporary dance comes from different scales of energy and time: musicians react in split-second peripheral glances with an accuracy that seems almost simultaneous to the listener. A dancer, however, has to somehow intuit or simply know the score so well as to catch these details without delay, while also dancing. Could this be put down to the scale difference in moving a finger versus moving a limb? Ultimately, it’s a similar procedure operating at different speeds.

The body which is culturally attuned to music also has been discussed as a “musicking body” (Rahaim 2012:8) and an “acoustic body” (Yamada 2001:104). Yamada emphasises the significance of bodily competence in order to perceive and react to the music (Yamada 2008:26–31), so dancers who dance in interaction with music, therefore, should certainly have an acoustic body, or a musicking body. As Judy Van Zile (1988:125, 132) powerfully insists, movement is so significant a part of the music event that a musician might be considered as a dancer. We can presume that musicians should also have a “dancing body” in three senses.³

To offer one difference of which I am certain between contemporary dance and contemporary music, we must make mention of work habits within their respective industries – Contemporary music (new music) has become a quasi industrialised production line; qualities that are given merit are those of consistency, reproducibility, punctuality and of course compliance. Compliance to the score, to the figure of “the composer” and to the understood tradition of music notation. The virtues of a good worker (musician) in this field are those who can reproduce consistent results, not necessarily those who play with style.

In contemporary dance on the other hand (and I may be completely wrong about this), I have experienced quite the opposite working style; a lot of discussion about the material, trial and error and heavy use of improvisation. Whilst, in the end, these ideas of reproducibility and consistency might well emerge – it is certainly by different means that they get there.

…a vortex of recurring reactions between self and others.⁴

As a  last thought on this: in the new music business it is common to learn a concert’s worth of new works, perform them once, and then move onto the next project. In dance there is more of an understanding that the labour involved in creating the work warrants a number of performances, rarely just a one-off. For me this is an enormous plus for dance, as there is an understanding that  performance is also a place where the work develops and is practiced. I wonder, have we cheapened the labour of music by industrialising it?

The Creative Dialogue’s Music and Dance program I have stumbled into,  turns out to be a part of a larger initiative started by Kaija Saariaho, Magnus Lindberg and Anssi Kauttunen in 2007. Of the three, Anssi is present along with composer Julian Anderson and choreographer Diana Theocharidis leading this summer course for young musicians, composers and dancers from various European institutions. 

The programme consists of a number of composer-choreographer collaborations, short (ca. 8 minutes?) works totaling in seven composed pieces as well as an improvisation by the whole cast at the end. Of the eight works, two in particular caught my attention in relevance to what has been discussed so far.

Immediately striking and playing into the theatre setting of the performance was Pascal Duspain and Diana Theochardis’ “Immer II”. Dancers moved around the space at the behest of a bodiless voice heard through the tannoy system of the theatre. At times, the simple instructions became little algorithmic procedures that when multiplied by 6 (the number of dancers on the stage) became elegantly chaotic and complex. At request, the group would quickly flock into a murmuration bounding diagonally across the space, then turn to dissipate and continue filling the floor.

The voice also gave awareness instructions, “breathe”, “look at the others in the space” as one might do in a warm up exercise. An interesting play occurs when one is a spectator to such a score, “are they talking to me too?”. In any circumstance, we in the audience can’t help but participate – we breathe in unison, and glance around like city-hares surveilling their burrow.

We suggest five possible relations between sound and body movements in a performance:
(a) the sound and body movement intertwined in a single performer; 
(b) the sound of a performer and the sound of others;
(c) the sound of a performer and the body movement of others;
(d) the body movement of a performer and the sound of others;
(e) the body movement of a performer and the movement of others.⁵

An addition of a cello seems somewhat arbitrary to the interesting polyphony already occurring on stage and between audience members. However, a new repertoire of sound and movement is introduced, the cellist sits, and draws out notes like sirens. This intervention focuses the energy of us ”others” into a focal point, allowing for the work to find a natural end through passage of the cello’s resonant and soothing lowest string (C).

Here, these relations are interpreted from the perspective of a single performer, while the “others” may be anyone present. Also, the term “performer” is used in a broad sense and can denote any of the actors involved in the process of creating a performance, including musicians, dancers, and audience members. “Sound” refers here to anything audible, not only to sounds that might be categorised as music. Although sounds are produced by body movement, some performers may concentrate only on the sound, not on the body movements through which it is generated.⁶

The stand out performance for me was Viktoria Grahv and Giorgos Papadopoulos’s appropriately titled “Dark Light” – the piece made use of a simple lighting intervention of three spotlights; one encapsulating the string quartet, the other the two dances, and finally the third which came into play only later in the piece by extending the dancing territory. Already with this lighting set up, a division of focus was made between dancer and musician. Meaning that the aforementioned discrepancy in timing or energy was cleverly used as a feature of the piece. 

Often, the dancers ricochet off the musicians impulse, a feeling for the tactile aspect of sound is hence represented. Noelia Rojas and Papadopoulos embody an ephemeral egregore, moving in almost unison smearing gestures in such a way as to allow ever more spontaneous collisions with Grahv’s score. In both aspects of the work, phrases slowly extended, developing into passages, which daisy-chained together to create ever longer sequences.

Thus, body movements and sound connect within a performance in multiple ways, circulating among multiple bodies, as if mutually converting and reinforcing creative energy.⁷

From the very first moments, a counterpoint is established – two simultaneous processes crossing each other. With all the cosmic improbability of a solar eclipse, they line up – there is an excitement to seeing these two different forces overlap, creating a moiré pattern of music and dance – or should I say, movement and sound.

 

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1. Mashino, Ako, and Elina Seye. “The Corporeality of Sound and Movement in Performance.” The World of Music 9, no. 1 (2020): 25. ↩︎
2. Ibid, 29. ↩︎
3. Ibid, 27. ↩︎
4. Ibid, 40. ↩︎
5. Ibid, 33. ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎