Expression (in dance and music)

This post was written in part as a reaction to a post by Nick Williams. In his post, if I understand correctly, he criticizes the “feeling it” crowd for being afraid of accepting good technique as a pre-requisite for good dance, and for being afraid of defining a dance (e.g. Lindy Hop - or Balboa, since Nick is the author) for fear of being limited in their expressive ability (or somehow giving judgmental power to third parties)¹.

This ties into a wider sense of uneasiness and annoyance I have with regard to the way modern culture confuses style, technique, vocabulary and expression. It not only hampers getting at what is important (to my eyes) but also taints the way people talk about dance and music. Of course these aren’t the only words for these concepts and the way I define them is probably not the only way. But I’m fairly certain that, whatever words we put on them, the following concepts should not be confused.

Technique

This has two aspects. The first is that technique is the foundation of vocabulary: there are things that you cannot say or do if you don’t have the technique down. The second is structural (good posture, doing a given movement “correctly”) and ranges from something that all can agree on (your technique should not cause or increase the likelyhood of permanent injury) to things that are often arbitrary and taken as ground truths (“you should hold your violin and bow in this way”) despite many examples of people “overcoming” a supposed lack of technique (Liz Carrol’s left hand hold on fiddle and Michael McGoldrick’s shoulder hold on flute being prime examples). There is no harm in encouraging beginners to seek out “perfect” technique, but I feel uncomfortable when, in art, technique becomes a stylistic element, admired for its own sake (check out the comments of any amateur youtube violin video to see people comment on bow holds, wrists, vibratos, posture, tone, intonation and all that rubbish which is absolutely meaningless in the grand scheme of things - is it good music?).

Vocabulary²

This is what you do with your technique. In dance it’s the “moves” (although I would argue that while dance can be analysed as a sequence of moves, it should not be thought of as constructed in that way. In music it’s the arpeggios, the phrases, the ways of ornamenting, the ways of varying. When performance art³ is prepared (composed or choreographed) what is often decided on is vocabulary. When improvising, elements of vocabulary are put together (again, this is post-hoc decomposition into elements of vocabulary, which does not necessarily imply intentional combination). Vocabulary is a construct we use to talk about reusable discrete units. In actual practice, the realization of one of these units belongs on a continuum with infinite possibilities.

Style

Style is both the individualisation of art and the collection of individualisations which define genres. Lindy hop, classical music, waltz, tango, bourrée, etc. It is in some way akin to dialect in language, except that, instead of serving the purpose of mutual intelligibility, it serves the dual purpose of “shortcut to creativity” and signal of belonging to a group. While vocabulary and technique sometimes incorporate or become part of stylistic elements, I believe it is fundamentally style which creates the boundaries from one genre to another, and a sufficient body of individuals pushing in a new direction which creates new stylistic schools and, eventually, new genres. Style is problematic - because it’s usually hard to put into words - and hard to teach. And often confusion between technique and style causes uniformity where there is no need for it. Style can also be mere “passing” fashion when it doesn’t go into a new genre or is not considered essential to a genre (like the “rolling triple step” of many early 2000 “groove” lindy hop videos).

Expression

Expression (which some people often call “emotion”, a whole ‘nother discussion I won’t go into here) is the statement you are making. It is what is fundamentally important in art. It’s what distinguishes art from sport. In sport, perfect technique can be admired both for its own sake and for the better performance it enables (though “rogue” skiers such as Bode Miller have shown how finding the best movement for one’s own body can be better than technical perfection). In art, what you say is where it’s at.

So what kinds of things do performance artists say? They can express a choreography/composition. Or they can improvise, be creating on the fly. The two are different but can be looked at in a similar way.

• “Look how awesome I am - because I have the technique to do this element of vocabulary which no-one else can do”. Nothing wrong with showcases, but they don’t express very much and must be masterfully inserted into the statement the artist is making (if there is one beyond “look how awesome I am”).
• “Here is where I would like to take the genre - while preserving its major stylistic elements”. These statements explore the boundaries of genre. What can I do in this medium? They are slightly more powerful statements. I feel they are also the riskiest kind of statement. They can fall flat, particularly in cases where the genre has already been there (usually 20 years ago): playing bagpipe tunes on guitar; playing guitar tunes on bagpipes… how boring! Expressing something else than joy and exuberance in Lindy? That’s considerably better (Jerry Almonte argues that this first happened/became pervasive about 10-15 years ago in modern Lindy). These statements are about choosing a set of artistic constraints which work well together. When a particular set of constraints fit well together, a new genre may emerge. On the other hand, they are very “meta” statements which can only be understood by someone familiar with the genre.
• An extreme version of these statements can lead to reconsidering what the whole art (dance, or music) is about. I believe we are powerfully in the need of new such statements, to get away from the pop culture “performance art is about showmanship” which is currently so pervasive. The whole “beautiful lines” thing which seems to be the norm these days in Lindy says something very strong about what performance dance should be and where Lindy fits into the rest of the dance world.
• “Here is how I see the world”. These statements are hard to make in non-figurative performance art and are more often to be found in painting or literature. They can nevertheless exist, particularly in retelling a classic story (e.g. lovers meeting). These statements are important to connect a genre with a wider audience.
• “Here is who I am”. The quintessential statement. It can be about who one is in the absolute, or who one is right now (or who one is acting as being). I like the honesty, the “in the moment”ness, the ephemerity of these statements, particularly when they are made in the context of social partner dancing. We are not waxing philosophical, we’re saying “here is how it feels to be me, dancing with you, to this music, at this time, in this place”. This is the kind of statement that anyone can make, even with limited vocabulary and technique. I also believe it is the fundamental power of music and dance to allow anyone, regardless of their ability, to communicate, to express themselves and, often, to get off their chest things that words cannot express.
• “I’m going to be entertaining”. A relative of “look how awesome I can be”, which is possibly orthogonal to the rest of artistic expression, but it specifically focuses on audience entertainment - something which some consider to be a cheap trick and which others consider the primary role of artists.

Where is the problem?

The main problem, as I see it, is that we (human pop culture as a whole) currently overemphasize beauty (and showmanship) and technique. Beauty is only one of the ways to make a statement about what performance art should be, but it isn’t even the only way to make such a statement, let alone the only kind of artistic statement that can be made. Showmanship is kind of orthogonal to expression but seems to best suit a race to the bottom (in that most of the expression I describe above cannot be perceived without a certain cultural background, but anyone can be impressed if they feel entertained).

But the worst is technique. My current pet theory is that with the increased need to be able to judge art (competitions, hiring decisions and teaching/assessment being the major culprits), we have needed to curricularise art. By focusing on technique, we turn the subjectivity of art evaluation into something more objective; we also sidestep the difficulty in teaching people to be artists, to be expressive, to be creative, because there are so many technical things to teach instead. The loop is now complete and hard to escape, because people who have themselves worked so hard on technique have a vested interest in admiring it for its own sake rather than for the expressivity it allows.

(This focus on technique also makes it easier for the general public to appreciate “art” - because then the only reason they don’t do art is that they think they need massive amounts of technique - rather than the simple desire to take a risk. It also simplifies art understanding - you can listen to a judge claim that the singing wasn’t in tune - and nod your head in agreement, as if in-tuneness even matters all that much - or can be objectively evaluated).

Back to defining a dance

So… what does this mean for the post that sparked all of this. From my descriptions above it will come as no surprise that I think that what defines a dance is its style - not its vocabulary, its technique or what it expresses. And for a post about defining the dance, Nick talks surprisingly little about style (except where he confounds it with the decried free for all of “feeling it”) and rather too much about expression and technique.

The assumption of defining a dance is that it involves telling the dancers where they have to be on every count and how they have to execute the movement. This builds into the argument that the best dancer is merely the one who is able to master the technique laid out before them. What this has brought about in the Lindy Hop community is a celebration of style over technique. “Feeling it” is higher on the food chain than beautiful movement.

The first place where I feel Nick is wrong is in mapping “style” and “technique” onto “feeling it” and “beautiful movement”. I think he is right that Ballroom is a worrying direction because they have melded “technique” and “style” to the point of dogmatism, severely limiting expression (there is something happening with vocabulary as well, but I don’t know enough about Ballroom to talk about it more). Beautiful movement isn’t (to my mind) in the domain of “technique”. Technique is a pre-requisite (you need the technique to let your body create the beautiful movement you intend for it), but style (swivels are beautiful in lindy - though when I first saw them, danced by Frida no less, I remember thinking they looked silly - reassuringly, I no longer think that) and especially expression are where beautiful movement is at. “Feeling it” is also an expressive element (and a particularly interesting one because technique isn’t necessarily a pre-requisite). So the “feeling it” vs “beautiful movement” distinction is not, to my mind, a concern of style, but of kinds of artistic expression and the statements they make.

Dance, like any other art form, is a skill-set. Mastering an art form takes mental and physical effort as well as time. There is a process most people follow in learning. The first step is to learn the trade and techniques that encompass the art form. Next is copying great works of those before you. Followed by the phase where one picks and chooses styles and techniques from different sources to construct your own style. The last phase is to include your own self expression, creativity and ingenuity to the art. There are exceptions, of course, but the majority of people follow this course.

This! This is exactly what is wrong with art education. We expect people to follow this path. Why should expression be the province only of the technical masters? How much technique is needed before you can find your own things to say? What about the vast majority of people who will never be technical masters - and who will take years and years to acquire the stylistic elements of a dance form (if they ever do). Of course, I am not arguing for expression as a replacement for technique, or suggesting that it is possible to make profound artistic statements without bags of technique, but expression should be developed in parallel to technique, from the get-go. (Isn’t that the goal for music and dance, to express stuff?)

Nick goes on to explain that in partner dancing, lack of (good) technique is even more detrimental because it spreads. This is true, but the flip of this is that lots of good technique is not necessary to set up a meaningful dance conversation with your partner.

There is an advantage for some to avoid defining, or loosely defining, a dance. It gives them the freedom to do whatever they want with no consequences in the name of self expression. The mentality “you can’t tell me what I’m doing is bad because I’m feeling it”. That in a street dance there are no rules.

Technical rules can be argued for or against, usually with no more argument in defense that “all the good dancers do this” (in lead-follow dance, these rules have a practical embodiment - if the lead isn’t successful, the technique behind it can be argued to be poor).

Stylistic rules are hard to verbalise (maybe even impossible - but that doesn’t meant the rules don’t exist). So you can probably say that someone is or is not doing Lindy, but it may be hard to say exactly why. But unless they thought they were doing Lindy and what they are doing loses all meaning if it’s not Lindy, I can hardly see why it would matter⁴.

The goal of every dance is to combine great technique with the emotional aspect.

Expression (?emotion) has nothing to do with either technique or style. There is either great expression (and the technical chops needed to express it) or there isn’t. The only reason to put great technique in is if it serves the artistic expression (or to pander to the rules of a contest or the expectations of an audience).

Nick then gives a video example of someone who is “feeling it”, but can’t dance. He says it sucks because the balance between emotion and technique is not there and so he doesn’t get pleasure out of it because it’s not “good dancing”. I say it sucks because it doesn’t know what it’s expressing - there are aspects of fitting (very badly - e.g. because of lack of basic musicality) into a genre, aspects of (very poor) showmanship and some pretty nice aspects of “this is who I am”. There is definitely an aspect of technical limitation, but with a more appropriately chosen discourse, the expression could be really touching and personal - even if not that profound (statements about who we are are rarely all that profound - but that’s the beauty of social dancing - you express fleeting, ephemeral things which disappear as soon as the moment is over, which do not need to be profound).

Conclusion: more expression, less technique; what does that have to do with style?

So there you have it. Rather than place judgement of good dancing on expression and technique, I would rather judge artistic expression based on what it is trying to say and the means that it uses to say it, thereby sidestepping the question of technique altogether. This is one part of my response to Nick’s post.

The other part of my response, is that these aspects of technique and expression have very little to do with actual style, genre or dance definition. Nick claims that the root behind not wanting to define style (e.g. putting a definition on Lindy Hop) is the fear (of the “feeling it” crowd) that it would open doors to judging dance on its technical merits. It think it is not necessary (maybe not possible) to verbalise style - but that even if we do, it is important not to confuse “good technique” and “style”. That is exactly what I would accuse Ballroom of having done. And is my reading of Nick’s post; I hope I misunderstood it.

So, if we want to get all geeky about defining dances and styles, that’s fine by me. But let’s not confuse this kind of discussion with the one about whether good dancing has to have good technique. And when we come to that discussion, I will definitely be arguing that good technique is only the means to an end and that we already focus on it way too much.