The bane of every discussion. A plethora of opinions and definitions, yet most are incomplete. Some fall short, and some make your eyebrow twitch. There are a ton of musicality classes, but are they really teaching it, or missing the point completely?
A fitting topic for a first post. Let us think it through.
Have you been to those classes labelled musicality, where the instructor plays a song and then teaches steps and isolations to match it? That is choreography - it works for that one song, and usually only in that exact order. Musicality is something else entirely.
Technique vs Musicality
First, let us not confuse technique with musicality. Technique is about finding the most effective way to execute a given task. Musicality is an internal rhythm, it is the urge to express what you feel through the music. It is not about doing a given step at a given moment. It is the need to express yourself when and how you want, putting what you feel into movement as best you can. Technique grows the potential you already have and widens your vocabulary. The two are different, one is the vocabulary, the other is the voice.
If they were the same thing, no beginner would have any musical sense and every advanced dancer would. We all know that is not the case. What beginners lack is the vocabulary to express their musicality in ways a world-class dancer would. So when we think we are judging musicality, we are really judging how well someone executes technique to the music.
Technique comes in degrees. Musicality, I would argue, does not - for any given song, it is either there or it is not. There is no such thing as a novice or average musicality. People would say "she can only shake her shoulders to a slow song" or "he only hits a few breaks". Come on, that's a joke. What those dancers lack is repertoire, vocabulary and training. Not musicality.
Emotions and Expression
Unlike learning an instrument or a new language, dancing is about expressing emotions with the body you have been using all your life. Of course, to do the moves and isolations top dancers do, you need technique and training. However, those moves are not musicality. They are simply moves a beginner cannot do yet.
Think of a newborn baby. All this baby can do is smile or cry. Yet it melts your heart that something with so little can express so much. Its crying breaks your heart, or drives you mad, because when a baby cries it goes for it as if there is no tomorrow. But the little it can say, it says perfectly and with total sincerity. In the same way, some beginners are more musical than dancers with years of experience.
And herein lies the problem. We become so biased that we fail to see the beauty in basic expression, the musicality in the newest of dancers. Teachers then fail to encourage it, whether due to the instant gratification world we live in or a simple lack of vision - that is a discussion for another time. As a result, students conform, and the musicality and self-expression get suppressed until, years later, their inner dancer starts screaming to get out.
So, for now: technique is not the road to musicality. We all have that internal rhythm. The real question is how much technique a dancer needs before others call them musical, and how much training it takes to let that rhythm speak.
Back to the baby, some children do not speak for years and suddenly break out in full, correct sentences. Some children babble for years, experimenting and being corrected. Whatever their natural gifts, it is a lifetime of learning that grows that talent.
There is no right way to learn, only the way you need to learn.
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