Quotes on Technique, Musicality, & Improvisation
“Seeking new levels of technical mastery should be a lifelong pursuit - not because you want to impress, but to facilitate any direction the great spirit inside you wants to go.”
- Kenny Werner, Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within
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“But it all becomes simple if the dancer remembers that the essence of good technique is to keep the two hearts perfectly together at all times throughout the dance, and that the purpose of this is to give the most satisfying dance to both partners, both emotionally and creatively. Good technique is designed to create an emotional connection, and also to create a framework that gives the maximum possible choreographic freedom.”
- Christine Denniston, The Meaning of Tango: The Story of the Argentinian Dance
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“Control is a beautiful thing in ballroom dance, any kind of dance, because with it you can master technique, and that frees you to be the artist creating something spontaneously divine and wonderful, something others enjoy watching.”
- Janet Carlson, Quick, Before the Music Stops: How Ballroom Dancing Saved My Life
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“Structure ignites spontaneity. Limits yield intensity. When we play … by our self-chosen rules, we find that containment of strength amplifies strength. Commitment to a set of rules (a game) frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible. Igor Stravinsky writes: ‘The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit . . . and the arbitrariness serves only to obtain precision of execution.’ Working within the limits of the medium forces us to change our own limits. Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be ‘free,’ but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves. If form is mechanically applied, it may indeed result in work that is conventional, if not pedantic or stupid. But form used well can become the very vehicle of freedom, of discovering the creative surprises that liberate mind-at-play.”
- Stephen Nachmanovitch
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“Well-executed decorations were much enjoyed by the dancers of the Golden Age. They were another way in which the individual flesh-and-blood person in your arms could be experienced, and as such increased connection and intimacy. They allowed both the leader and the follower to express the details of their own personal musicality. They were also a compliment to the other dancer’s skill. Dancing with an inexperienced dancer takes more concentration, leaving fewer possibilities to decorate well.”
- Christine Denniston, The Meaning of Tango: The Story of the Argentinian Dance
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“. . . music can be transcendent. For a few moments it makes us larger than we really are, and the world more orderly than it really is. We respond not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them. As our brains are thrown into overdrive we feel our very existence expand and realize that wee can be more than we normally are, and that the world is more than it seems. That is cause enough for ecstasy.”
- Robert Jourdain, Music, the Brain and Ecstasy
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“Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for - liberation.”
- Martha Graham
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[Chen Lizra:] As a well established dancer, instructor and choreographer, what would you recommend to beginner dancers and experienced ones?
[Felix Bambury Webbe:]
• Understand the origin of the dance that you want to learn.
• Each dancer should interpret their dance steps within the music like an instrument in a musical group.
• Dancers should recognize the details of posture, the correct angle between partners, the interrelationship, the delicacy of maintaining the steps while listening to the rhythm of the music.
• To enjoy the dance, there is an inseparable tie between the enjoyment of the rich rhythm of the music that is man, woman and music.
- from Chen Liza’s interview with Cuban dance instructor Felix Bambury Webbe
