Music Mapping 101
The most challenging aspect of being a dancer is finding music that moves you, past that it’s figuring out what to do with it. Structuring choreography or improv for a song can be an arduous task, but I have a little trick I use to speed up the process. I call it “The Magic Arc” (catchy, huh?). It’s not necessarily a new concept, writers use something very similar called a “story arc”. Essentially, as dancers, we are using our bodies to tell a story, so it makes sense that we might want to use a technique reserved for writers.
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On the image above, you’ll see that I have numbers and dots marking certain points in the arc. These are the markings I use to determine what I’m going to do during the music. The numbers represent certain movements I’d like to incorporate and the dots represent changes in the focus, whether it’s musical focus (say, I want to work with the beat more than the melody), character focus (going from one emotion to another), or anything else, really. The great thing about interpreting music is that the sky is the limit. My suggestion for interpreting music with lyrics is to take the lyrics into consideration but not to go for the most literal translation of those lyrics in your movement. For example, if I hear lyrics about drinking wine, I’m probably not going to mime drinking wine. Obviously, there are exceptions to every rule, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt.
The main point of the arc is to keep you from using your whole bag of tricks within the first minute of your music. Generally speaking, if you tend to get nervous when you dance in front of other people, you might be tempted to bust out all your intricate and dramatic material right off the bat and then you have three minutes of a song to fill with nothing else to give. When you already feel anxious about performing, it may sometimes feel as though the music has slowed down by fifty percent and you’ve been onstage forever and oh my god what if the audience hates this. This tends to create frenetic movement and a lack of focus during your performance. If you’ve mapped out your music ahead of time, really taken the time to prepare yourself for performance, and thought about the type of emotion you’d like to tap into, you are less likely to become flustered.
It’s important to have a build up and release to your movement. I’ll even take it to a different level by giving a little, taking it away, giving more, taking away, giving most dramatic movement I have, then releasing completely. It’s almost like teasing the audience. You never want to leave them feeling completely satisfied, they should always want to see more. You can place the climax of the arc pretty much where ever you want on or past the middle of the music. I let the music and my own interpretation of it guide me.
I’d love to hear your techniques for music mapping, too!
