Blog #46 Silence is Golden when Teaching Musicality
Jul 01, 2021Congratulations! You made it! What a year, eh? You and I both know that many things were dropped from regular practice in some of your dancers' approach to ballet class. They could be summed up in the word ‘Consistency’ I think.
Consistency in attendance. (Ballet class on zoom sucks! Really any education for a child on zoom sucks. Who’s with me on that?!)
Consistency in using their turnout (when was the last time you got to actually activate a child’s turnout muscles?)
Consistency in their response to music. (It’s impossible to even tell through the delays of zoom!)
All of this was fairly difficult for you to encourage from afar!
Now that dancers are beginning to get back into the studios and back to dance, how can you remind them to not only hear the music and respond to it, but actually have their own internal rhythm that is connected to the music they're hearing?
Silence
One way to do that is with silence. Using silence in dance is powerful. It forces your dancers to feel music internally. It forces their creativity to be fed from within instead of from the music. It forces them to keep time without their metronome of music, whether recorded or live.
As a pianist, I often use silence as a means to back-lead the dancers in the qualities their teachers are looking for, such as silence when their leg is coming down from a grand battement (to support the controlled downward motion) or silence at the top of a fondu (to encourage the lift and stretch). Silence is especially magical in grand allegro since silence at the top of the jump actually makes the jumps feel bigger and more lifted; almost as if time stops or slows down!
Silence is golden in so many ways! (Parents, can I get an amen!?)
Using Silence to Develop Your Dancers’ Internal Metronome
Ballet teachers who are working with musicians, you could ask your musician to cut out randomly in order to force your dancers to maintain their tempos. They might find this weird, but if you explain it once, they should be good to go.
If you're working with recorded music, you could turn the volume right down whenever you feel that it's a great time to challenge their musicianship.
Silence forces your dancers to find their musicality from within instead of spoon feeding it to them.
Group Musicality Through Silence
A way to develop group musicality and responsiveness is to bring your dancers into a circle. Ask them to link their arms behind each others’ backs and then close their eyes. Now they need to, by feeling each others’ breaths, align all their breathing so that everyone is breathing in and out at the same time, this could take a little bit of time but let them settle into it, give them time. Once that is happening, They can let go and step back 2 or 3 steps. At this point ask them to demonstrate their breathing with arm movements, like the shape of the lungs. Bigger shape as they fill up, smaller shape as they exhale. The goal is to maintain the same rhythm of breath as when they were all touching.
I wish you the happiest of summer days and the most wonderful weekend coming up! If you’re looking for other ideas to keep class interesting, grab this free resource that I created for you, 10 Creative Ways to Use Music!
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