Embodiment in dance - relationships between expert intentional movement and music in ballet

Abstract

Embodied music cognition posits that there is a relationship between the emergent properties of a musical piece and the way musicians, dancers and listeners experience them in their body-minds. Musicological analyses assign kinetic properties to music, under the assumption that the sonic forms have the capacity to activate movement; in other words, that music ‘moves’ us. But, in which sense the movement elicited by music is indeed based on music? These questions are not fully answered so far. This paper analized comparatively musical and choreographic phrases in different ballet interpretations, with the aim of identifying the extent to which these two expressive modes convey similarities, regularities and/or synchronization features. Similarities in the performances were detected with respect to: correspondences between movement, musical phrase articulation and embedded levels of metric hierarchy; quality of movement production at the locus of maximal tension; a synchronized relationship between movement and music that implies anticipated gesture preparation and delayed gesture retraction with respect to the onset sound. The coherent relationship between movement and music is similarly communicated in the expert performances analyzed. The coupling between the emergent tension of movement and the tonal tension conveyed by music is produced in a consistent way and it is not dependent on the particular type of choreographic movement but instead on its gestural quality.