Musical Movement
Материал из HEPTACHOR.
The aim of Musical Movement is to give creative expression to our experiences of music. Listening to music, we often make small unconscious movements, like tapping a foot. Similarly, we have feelings and desires, which rarely find outward expression and remain vague and inarticulate. Left alone, these inner movements and feelings are often lost for us. By expressing them through dance, we can shape and clarify these experiences.
Musical Movement helps us do, in Lev Tolstoy’s words, “what the music tells us to do”. It can deepen our experience of the music. By taking music as the dominant and most precious element of dance, it teaches us to listen to and understand serious and complicated musical pieces. By being maximally loyal to the music, it liberates a dancer from the constraints of a particular style: all that is important is to follow the music.
Musical Movement is a direct response to the music, an improvisation. To learn it is to learn how to improvise, find freedom, be loyal to one’s own feelings, be oneself… But it is also how to be a good choreographer, to give to the music expression that will directly touch the audience.
The teaching method is based on a century-long tradition and the experience of four generations of dancers and dance teachers.
- The standard course, which was developed in the 1920s and has been creatively improved since, takes from two to three years. The training has elementary, middle and advanced levels.
- The practitioners of Musical Movement created hundreds of original exercises to music pieces by various composers as well as to folk tunes. There are special exercises for developing particularly valuable characteristics of movement – such as fluidity, power and spring-like character – and also the ability to dance with other people.
- Special attention is given to the development of musicality – that is, the ability to experience and express music. Classes are always with live accompaniment (instrumental music, singing) and include the development of such skills as listening and responding to simple music pieces, individual and collective improvising to more complex pieces and composing one’s own dance.
- “Inner singing” along with the music is used as an important teaching device; so is a sophisticated breathing technique which helps to improve the ability to both dance and sing. (Musical Movement is used successfully in training accomplished opera singers.)
