Chris (et al.), I have a question about something you wrote...
Chris, UK wrote: > The count is simply the means used by DIC teachers to tell the class which > step to do when. [...] In truth that's the job of the music, and the dancer's > feeling for it. These two statements reference quite different things, no? Counting steps is merely putting them in order. The "count" of the music is another thing entirely, and may or may not have a direct relationship with the ordinal sequence of steps. To judge by what you write, it seems that these different exercises are often conflated simply because they both use the same range of numbers. But I've never conflated them myself, nor have I noticed many others doing it. In fact, the only dancers that come to mind are certain performers with stage-training... if they open a routine with the 8CB (and many of them do), it's invariably off the music. (Sometimes I see them trying to collect with the beat, but they always fail for some reason...) Now, I wouldn't argue that the 8CB, or any pattern, is inherently unmusical; just that _a direct association_ of the step-count with the beat-count is usually a recipe for clunkiness... the culprit in most cases being a faulty notion of how to "count" rhythm. But why people who can't play a drum would ennoble themselves to explain rhythm at all is beyond my ken. To get to the actual question here... Is there really a widespread (and deliberate?) conflation between step-order and the measure of the music-- or am I just splitting hairs? Jake DC _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
