Joy in Motion

The Test of Sudden Silence: Dancing in the Now of the Music

Imagine a few scenarios that are not uncommon in the dance world: The instructor stops your practice session mid-song. The DJ’s equipment malfunctions, causing a sudden stop in the music. A song finishes at a place you weren’t expecting.

In each of these scenarios, how long does it take you to respond with your movement?

If the time lapse between the music stopping and you responding is so immediate that you can’t really quantify it, then you are connected to the music in a way that all dancers should aim for. If you are not in this category, it is definitely something you should think about. How can you connect with the music more so your body naturally stops its movement when the music is no longer breathing life into it?

This is largely a matter of active listening: listening to the music as if you were attentively listening to a person in a conversation, not as if you were only vaguely aware of a TV blaring in the background. Dancers who actively listen stop on a dime (or quickly transition from movement to stillness) when the music stops because of their deep level of engagement. Dancers who use the music as a time-keeper and as atmospheric background noise continue with multiple steps and patterns before stopping, because their minds are engaged in movement without its relationship to the music, in a future pattern without the partner’s feel and response in the present moment. Even dancers who know the music well may be ahead in the music, planning their moves in advance and thereby missing that moment-by-moment connection with their partner and the music.

Right up front with the expansion of time…

Josh Waitzkin, in his excellent book The Art of Learning, writes about witnessing a woman becoming so angry at a bicyclist who nearly bumped into her that she lost her perception of the present and was tragically hit by a car. The woman’s displacement of herself in time became an analogy Waitzkin used for remaining engaged in the moment during competitive chess, martial arts, and other disciplines:

“I have always visualized two lines moving parallel to one another in space. One line is time, the other is our perception of the moment . . . When we are present to what is, we are right up front with the expansion of time, but when we make a mistake and get frozen in what was, a layer of detachment builds. Time goes on and we stop. Suddenly we are living, playing chess, crossing the street with our eyes closed in memory.”

When beginners first learn to dance, they often have their “eyes closed in memory.” This is a necessary stage in the learning process. Because they have not yet developed a quick response time and are still working on moving from consciousness to informed instinct, they often take seconds to make sense of what happens and react accordingly. As they progress, they shift from living in the past to projecting into the future, anticipating what is coming next or coasting on autopilot during a sequence without truly living through each and every step. Although this other extreme is not desirable either, it can sometimes be a useful step in the learning process to develop fluency, flow, and confidence. Ideally, the learner pushes back and forth between getting stuck in the past and plowing ahead to the future until he or she finds comfort and excitement with dancing in the present (consider, for example, Landing Her First from AmpsterTango).

Unfortunately, many dancers don’t find the present even when they have developed the skill and experience to do so. Once they get beyond that beginning phase of dancing in the past, they stay attached to dancing in the future, and the improvisational character of the dance becomes distorted, resulting in a stale or even choreographed feel. When this happens, they are not allowing their partner and the music to affect them in each moment. As Waitzkin describes, they get frozen in another time and become detached from the moment-by-moment interactivity of the partnership and the music.

The good news is that dancing in the present is largely a matter of shifting perspective, drawing attention to the present over and over until it becomes a natural way of dancing. It doesn’t mean breaking movement into slices so that the flow is destroyed. On the contrary, developing our perception so that we are aware and responsive at each moment allows us maintain flow. It does this by getting us out of the rut of mindless repetition of patterns detached from the music and the connection that is a sure sign of dancing in the future. Instead, every pattern is relational, and every moment is living. Both objective and subjective reality – the line representing time and the line representing our perception of the moment – are united, creating a truly improvisational dance in which we move and connect, not just in the now but in the now of the music.

Living in the real rhythms…

Right after I finished this article, I came across another quote that beautifully expresses this concept of living, listening, and dancing in the present. I typically take this – running into quotes or examples that so perfectly confirm thoughts I’ve just written about – as a blessing of sorts, some kind of supernatural confirmation. It could also be that once you open yourself up to something, you start seeing its truth everywhere. Either way, I find it fitting to wrap up this article with words from David Steindl-Rast:

“The message of the hours is to live daily with the real rhythms of the day; to live responsively, consciously, and intentionally directing our lives from within, not being swept along by the demands of the clock, by external agendas, by mere reactions to whatever happens.  By living in the real rhythms, we ourselves become more real.  We learn to listen to the music of the moment, to hear its sweet implorings, its sober directives.  We learn to dance a little in our hearts, to open our inner gates a crack more, to hearken to the music of silence, the divine life breath of the universe.”

I had already chosen the picture to place at the beginning of this article before I found Steindl-Rast’s quote, but they seem to match each other perfectly. The split second before the sun emerges on the horizon or from behind a tree represent to me the anticipation, excitement, and beauty of riding the waves of time, a joy without which music – and dance – wouldn’t exist. 

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