Categories
understanding music

Understanding Music

When I teach advanced students I put the focus of education on understanding conceptual work inside the dance and understanding the music. I already started the dance concepts series and I will start a series of texts about music soon. I wanted to call it “music theory for dancers” but that would be misleading because it is not really music theory.

So for lack of a better name I call this new series “understanding music”. I will cover topics like:

What is counting and why do I need it? Alternatives to counting and their applications. Why the f#~k do we count until 8 and start over? What is a bar, a measure, a meter, a rhythm, a polyrhythm, a syncope, a backbeat, a clave, a triplet … and so on.

I will explain why it is a good idea to know this stuff and how to take advantage of that insights. In order to do this in a understandable way I will have to create some audio examples. Therefore it might take me a little longer to come up with this posts.

I will start out with the basics, so that everyone has the possibility to follow the rest. From there we can go into any direction. So if you have preferences on which topics to cover first, let me know.

Categories
blog

Working together in flexible structures as strategy in niche markets

When active in a nice market people tend to avoid working with other people in the same niche. One is afraid of losing possible customers to the others.

In most cases it is much better to do the opposite and connect with as many active people in your field as possible.

I use an example from our austrian hip hop scene to show why:

There is a loose group of dancers that are responsible for doing a ton of projects, despite the fact that they are not in the same crew. Under different leadership they are doing event management, theater productions, movies, commercial shows, fashion labels and music production. The advantage is that everyone has an experienced workforce and at the same time more work during the year. All of this would not be happening if we avoided each other.

Categories
blog

Why you should dance to the whole song

In workshops or interviews with OGs of our dances you hear the phrase “back in the days we danced to the whole song” a lot. I am sure their reasons were different, but here is a list of reasons why we should dance to the whole song.

  1. A good song has different parts that can shine through our dance. If we don’t dance to them all, we miss out on opportunities.
  2. The longer your work with a song, the better you understand it.
  3. We dance for a longer period of time. That helps our stamina.