Connection 1: Body language

We have finally arrived at what I think is possibly the most interesting - and most confusing - issue discussed by partner dancers: Connection. We have already flirted with questions of connection in earlier posts but now we will dive into them head first. The discussion will begin by introducing connection as a kind of tactile language; a means of communicating through forces and shapes experienced/observed in two dance partners' bodies. We will then consider an argument that a particular system of such language is more effective than others that are commonly used in facilitating musical, co-creative dancing. It will be argued that this system is more-or-less universal between the various styles of improvisational partnered jazz dancing, being different only in fine-tuning between Lindy, Blues and Bal (and other styles as well, even outside the jazz genre). Finally, this system will be explained in depth. In order for the explanation to be as clear as possible, a simple physical model of connection will be developed and explored. Please don't worry if you've never studied physics; I will attempt to explain things in a way that is accessible to everyone. For those who are interested in the quantitative details of the model, there will be small 'technical supplement' (read as 'shameless geekfest') sections along the way.

It is useful here to state a very brief summary of much of what has been discussed in earlier posts:

• There are many ways to define 'good swing dancing'; we have chosen to define it as musically co-creative connected movement which is innovative within a historical frame.
  
• Both musical auditory processing and sensory-motor control of your body are evolved human capacities and carry the legacy of that evolution.
• Gestural and (later) verbal language provided the survival advantage of efficient communication in cooperative social groups. Current theories of the neural processing of music suggest that it evolved in parallel with language processing. We have speculated that musicality in dance results from the music-verbal language-gestural language links.
• Fast, efficient sensory-motor control of a single human body (ie. the one which houses the brain that controls it) is biologically evolved and therefore intuitive. Control of two connected bodies, shared between two brains, has evolved not biologically but culturally, through trial and error, by many dancers over many years. These systems involve self-imposed restrictions on the movement of each individual partner, which facilitate shared control.
  
• Particular systems of shared body control have emerged as more effective than others. These are the systems used by the most respected dancers. Good teaching consists in distilling these systems into basic principles and communicating those principles accessibly, in entertaining ways, to students.
  
• Individual partners move in a way conducive to good shared control when they move with maximum predictability over time scales short compared with a whole dance (ie. less than a second to a few seconds). Predictability over longer time scales (eg. Dancing the same move or sequence of moves over and over) can make a dance uninteresting, so good dancing combines predictability over short times with originality over longer times. We have speculated that maximum predictability over short time scales is achieved when individual dance partners move in such a way as to minimise the jerk of the motion of their individual centres of mass. This makes the dancers' motion smooth, preventing sudden, difficult-to-work-with changes, each partner helping the other to have the experience, "Ah, I can feel and see what you're doing and where you're going. I can work with that!".
• For the purposes of good shared control, the primary function of steps and footwork is to carry movement; where you put a foot is much less important than how you control the motion of your centre of mass through the space above it.
• The following steps are required for shared control:

1. Partition the control into roles of lead and follow. The roles can be passed back and forth but in general, only one person is leading and the other is following at any given time.
   
2. Restrict individual movement in the ways described for leader and followers in an earlier post.
3. Restrict the connection system to obey a particular set of rules, which is known to both partners, or can be learned through 'tuning in' to each other on the social dance floor.
   
4. Cooperate to create shared movement, which reflects the music.
   

Now, for a very simple functional definition of connection: Connection is achieved when the motion of one partner's centre of mass is influenced by - and influences - the motion of the other partner's centre of mass, in a predictable way. Let's keep this in mind as we proceed. First, however, we will take a step back and consider connection as a kind of language-based conversation, which will provide a familar analogy against which to frame the later technical discussions.

The various partnered jazz dance styles are primarily social dances, meaning that the primary goal within each is for a dancer to be able to visit a place where (s)he has never danced before, dance with someone (s)he has never met before, to music (s)he has never heard before and still have fun. This extreme flexibility requirement places heavy constraints on the complexity of the movement/connection system which dancers should learn. Strict systems with long lists of specific rules to learn are not likely to facilitate this kind of flexibility. So, if dancers seek to learn lots of specific moves as their end goal, they may find that unfamiliar partners don't know any of the same moves, making it difficult to find common ground on which to share a fun dance. We can make a linguistic analogy here, imagining that two strangers - one English speaker and one Spanish speaker, say - might try to prepare to have a conversation in a new language (eg. Japanese) which is unfamiliar to them both. If they each prepare by learning randomly selected phrases from a phrase book, it is unlikely that their conversation will achieve any depth, if it manages to get off the ground at all. What's required then, are some general rules - preferably as few of them as possible - allowing people to communicate flexibly. In language, these are the rules of grammar, which allow for the building of meaningful, original sentences. Two mutually unfamiliar dancers can have a creative, original dance then, if they just know the same rules of grammar, which is a significally smaller set of things to learn than a long list of pre-cooked sentences.

I think it's interesting to spend a moment discussing the language spoken between regular dance partners, particularly in the case of rehearsing/performing choreography. Frequently, such partnerships are able to achieve things in their dancing, which neither partner can achieve while dancing socially with someone else: particularly impressive tricks and aerials; quick, subtle changes of direction, etc. At the same time, the dancers in the partnership might not have as much fun while dancing with each other as they do when dancing with unfamiliar others, because all too often, with each other they are having the same conversation over and over. We might think of this as analogous to a couple of actors playing out the same scene, learned from a script. They have each got their own lines down, complete with emotional nuances, and can predict each other so well that the scene flows smoothly enough to convince an audience. But the internal experience of the actors themselves is not the same as it would be if they were having a real, original conversation. Yes, if they are good actors they are still able to bring some genuine emotion to the script and 'play off' each other but they both know that there is only one way the conversation will go.

Ok, so, point taken, I hope. What does this have to do with connection - the physical mechanism by which dancers achieve movement together? The key point, I believe, is the amount of information which must be pre-learned by the dancers. Choreography still uses connection but it uses very complicated connection. It does this because it can afford to - there's lot of time to learn the rules and rehearse. Choreographed performances might involved sections where two dance partners are able to precisely coordinate their movements without being in physical contact at all. They might use subtle visual signals in order to communicate when it's time to change and do something differently. And as a result of all this complexity, they are able to achieve things which are rarely achieved on the social dance floor. It would be *great* if every dance we ever had looked as good as the best choreographed performances. Indeed, when most of us first come to partner dancing, we dedicate ourselves to learning cool new moves and tricks and love dancing them on the social floor with familiar partners who know the same stuff. But we soon realise that the prospect of having the experience of executing precise choreography with everyone we ever dance with is going to require a godlike memory and a preparatory discussion before every dance. "Hi! Would you like to dance? Great! Do you know such a such a move? Do you know how to get into it from this move? What about this sequence? Ok, well, let's forget the sequence but we can do that move. Great! Let's do it!" Imagine having to go through all that every time you want to have a dance! It might be fun and impressive to pre-learn a script and act out an amusing 'conversation' for an audience but trying to take the system by which that is achieved and imposing it on social dancing doesn't result in much fun. So, what's the alternative? A simple, powerful system of tactile connection; a mechanical grammar which allows two unfamiliar dance partners to achieve amazing things on the social floor without any shared preparation whatsoever. Dancers the world over pay good money to learn from instructors who have mastered this, and students with a passion for excellence spend months and years trying to put the teachings into practice.

I don't think I'm describing anything new here. I think dancers know that they need to learn general rules of movement and connection. I skeptical, however, that there exists a single, well-formulated grammar of dance connection, which is agreed upon by everyone. Different teachers teach different grammars and when their students try to dance together, it is analogous to two people who speak different languages trying to have a conversation. The languages aren't usually all that different; it's not like Mandarin and French coming together. I think it's usually something more like different dialects of the same language. Nonetheless, this can make things difficult. Sometimes the two partners can manage to figure each other's dialects out and have a great dance. Other times though, there is an ongoing clash. One might argue that there simply isn't a singluar 'best' grammar and there's no point trying to find one. I think this is too strong a statement. I think that there are good reasons to argue for a single, optimal system of connection - a single, most effective grammar - which, if learned by everyone, would facilitate 'better' (according to our definition) dancing. Sure, there will always be dialects but perhaps the goal should be to leave them behind, or least be aware of them so that one can choose one's particular, quirky dialect consciously, rather than because it's the only think one knows how to do. I am not arguing here against individual styles; far from it! I'm arguing for a clear system of communication. Two people who speak exactly the same language can certainly have fun, meaningful, creative, exciting conversations!

In what follows, I will attempt to describe what I believe might be the optimal dance connection grammar, which is used by the world's best dancers. I should make a small qualifying point here that Lindy, blues, Bal, etc, are definitely different dialects. But they are NOT different languages from a biophysical standpoint. I cannot emphasise this strongly enough. The systems of muscle control used by Blues dancers are the same as those used by Bal dancers. The two dances differ only in so far as those systems are subject to historical constraints. Bal dancers only 'talk' (ie. have tactile discussions on the dance floor) about the topics which are accepted by the Bal community, and vice versa for blues dancers. But the language they speak when having those topical discussions is the same. The (relevant) nerves attached to your muscles do not know whether you are dancing Bal, Lindy, Blues or Polka. All they are able to tell your brain is how long/stretched each muscle is, and how much load/force it is bearing. Your brain accepts signals of this type from every skeletal muscle in your body constantly, synthesises them, interprets them in the context of whichever dance you are choosing to do, decides what to do next, and then activates the relevant muscles when required. This is not to say that there are not different systems of shared body control out there. There are. But as far as I can tell, the systems used in all of the various improvisational partnered jazz dances are fundamentally the same. The differences between them are less than fundamental.

In the next post we will get down to business and begin describing the simple, fundamental rules of connection, the rules which relate the shapes in dancers' bodies to the forces they are applying on their partners.

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What is musicality?

Let's try this on as a simple, working definition: A dance is musical when it looks and feels like the music sounds. But how can a look or a feeling be like a sound? I don't have a complete answer to this and, as far as I know, no one else does yet either. But let's discuss some clues.

Sights are sounds: Synesthesia

There is a fascinating phenomenon called synesthesia, which is well studied in perceptual psychology. Synesthesia is a cross-over between senses (sight, hearing, taste...), in which particular experiences from one sense are accompanied by experiences from another sense. For example, a synesthete (a person with synesthesia) may see the colour red when hearing a middle C. An E might be green, a D blue, and so on. Synthesesia comes in all shapes and sizes and sometimes produces strange effects within a single sense; a synesthete friend of mine once told me that she always sees particular letters and numbers in particular colours, regardless of the colour of the text she's looking at (though she's also able to see that colour too; she's conscious of both at once). So, the number 1, for example, is always experienced as yellow, even if the font colour is black. A famous example is an incident in which an accomplished composer/musician visited a tailor and ordered 'a suit in the key of C major'.

Last I read about the subject -- some years ago now -- the prevailing brain science explanation for synesthesia was that neurons in the parts of the brain that deal with different senses would establish connections with each other, which don't exist in most people's brains. These connections would allow the neurons to 'talk' to each other, producing effects that most people don't experience. As it happens, all these regions are located nearby to each other (the whole cluster is called the sensory cortex) in an area at the top of your head, about half way along, called the parietal lobe. This proximity means it's easy for connections to form between visual and auditory neurons, for example. When particular visual neurons fire they might cause connected auditory neurons to fire, and this causes an auditory experience to accompany the visual experience.

Synesthesia is a clear demonstration of natural overlaps between experiences in different senses but it doesn't happen to everyone; it is a 'disorder' affecting a small minority. On the other hand, musicality in dancing seems to be recognisable to everyone. How can we account for this?

Musicality as a quirk of language evolution

Language is among the most intensely studied fields in psychology. It has been argued that humans, uniquely among animals, have an innate capacity for complex language with properties like grammar (Read Stephen Pinker or Noam Chomsky if you want to look into this). It is thought that there are universal laws underlying the grammatical structures in different languages (that is, universal rules about how the specific rules arise). By this theory, the most basic laws of language are hereditary, and these are applied as a child learns particular languages provided by his/her environment.

There are various ideas about how this 'language instinct' evolved in humans. Some authors, like Pinker, argue that language was itself an adaptive trait (it helped our ancient ancestors to survive and reproduce by improving their ability to communicate and work together) and evolved through natural selection. Others, like Chomsky, argue that language appeared as a byproduct of other adaptations. Both of these positions -- the former in particular -- are faced with the challenge of explaining the process of language evolution. What primitive communication strategies came before the complex
languages that eventually evolved? As far as I know, there are a number of competing theories about these early communication systems but I'd like to focus one popular one: that gesture -- visual and tactile language -- was one such early strategy, and verbal/auditory language was gradually added to systems of gestural communication before evolving to dominate them. This resulted in the verbal language systems we have today, where talking/listening is primary and gesture plays a lesser but important part.

By now you might be wondering, what does all this have to do with musicality in dance? Current theories in the psychology of music (see for example, Daniel Levitin's book, 'This is your brain on music') hold that humans' unique capacity for music production and appreciation are a by-product of our unique, evolved capacity for language. Music and language share many fundamental features. Both exploit tone, rhythm, pitch, pause, etc. It can even be shown that the structures in music obey grammatical laws, partly innate and partly culturally defined, just like in language (see Levitin's book).

Echoes of early language evolution can still be seen in the way that people communicate today. Gesture is still a natural part of verbal communication. It might be tempting to write this off as coincidence but there is compelling evidence for a deep, innate capacity for association between visual shapes and sounds. In 1929, the German-American psychologist, Wolfgang Koehler did an experiment in which participants were shown the following two shapes,


and asked which assignment of the two names 'Bouba' and 'Kiki' seemed most natural to them, based only on the sounds of the names and the appearance of the shapes. There was 98% agreement that the shape on the left is the Kiki and the one on the right, the Bouba. 98%! The explanation for this result remains controversial but prevailing theories are based on the above-explained connection between shape and sound, that evolved for communication purposes.

Given that current theories about music psychology trace the roots of music to language evolution, it seems reasonable that the echoes of early language evolution should also be seen in how people interpret and communicate music. We might expect that there should be natural, innate associations between musical sounds and gestures, the latter being made up of shapes and movements. And, importantly, those associations should be shared throughout the population. It is not hard to see how a natural theory of dance musicality emerges from these ideas. Anyone who has ever been to a dance contest and listened to the cheering will know that the crowd tends to agree when the competitors do something particularly musical! This recognition applies not just to momentary shapes but also to whole trajectories of dance. A sequence of tone-matching shapes, strung together through movements that match the musical dynamics and end in a visual full-stop coinciding with a 'break' in the music seem to exemplify innate associations between sounds, shapes, motions, and overall grammatical structure.

This is musicality; a delicious remnant of our evolutionary past.

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