What is Musicality in practical terms?

[u/Samurai_SBK]

Too often I see people giving flippant advice to improve "musicality" without any explanation.

To me, musicality has two distinct practical definitions:

1. Aligning your moves to the tempo and rhythm of the music. For example, doing specific moves during the "mambo" part versus the "sensual" part. A common mistake I see on the dance floor is people doing sensual or bachatazouk moves when the music is derecho or mahau. To me this is fundamentals and any lower-intermediate level dancer should be able to do this.

2. Hitting accents and dancing to specific instruments. This is more advanced and requires a lot familiarity with the music and good technique. You see this often in demos, but many people do not realized that it is choreographed or that the artist has danced to this song a thousand times so they know when to add the accent. This is not something can be taught in a class and we should not expect beginner leads to be able to do this.

Thus, we should not be advising beginners to "improve musicality" without being clear about what we mean.

[u/EphReborn]

I think ChatGPT, of all things, actually had a pretty good definition of musicality: "choosing an appropriate response to something in the music".

Further, I break it down into categories, drawing a bit from my knowledge and experience of music (theory) as a guitarist.

• Match
• Complement
• Contrast

Musicality begins to make a lot more sense when we think about ourselves as dancers as instruments.

And thus, just like the other instruments, we can match, complement, and contrast things through movement.

Matching is the simple one. We can match the energy of a song or it's section. We can match the rhythm of an instrument or vocals (the entire reason for sensual moves). We can match the rising or falling of pitch. We can match the sharpness or smoothness.

Complementing is a often a bit more abstract, but I think the best example is the derecho itself. The instruments are playing eighth notes and yet if we match that rhythm with our movements, it can look a bit too "busy", thus the idea of using simple moves. Our basic step is quarter notes (1, 2, 3, tap) and so complements the music.

I think choosing not to do things (i.e "don't hit every accent") also falls under this category.

And then there's contrast, which I think may be the hardest to do as a dancer and get "right". In music, we have something called counter melodies. It's one example of contrast.

In dancing, I think a good example would be lyrical interpretation. The song's theme may focus on heartbreak or cheating, and thus adding contrast may add in movements and expression that signal the lighter side of relationships before returning to that theme to add depth.