Conference Agenda

In September 2019, spectators at L’Opéra de Paris encountered a new approach to Rameau’s Les Indes galantes. Bintou Dembélé—renowned French hip-hop choreographer and first Black woman to choreograph at L’Opéra—transported dance styles such as wacking, voguing, krump, and break-dancing from streets and night clubs to a historical stage in Paris. Dembélé’s choreographed the “Danse du Grand Calumet Paix, exécutée par les Sauvages” with krump, a style created in 2000’s Los Angeles that evokes increased emotional reactions. As the choreographer herself acknowledges: “We use very expressive dance forms. Krump adds a lot to that. The emotional charge overflows…”

In this paper, I investigate how dancers’ bodies and music work together to communicate the “overflow of emotional charge” Dembélé describes. Her choreography changes how audiences encounter Rameau’s music, eliciting affective states that subvert the rondeau’s usual predictability. To overload the emotional charge, Dembéle manipulates the choreography’s intensity overriding the rondeau’s form. I ground my analysis on kinetic affect and evaluate how spectators feel this type of affect using the theory of constructed emotions.

I demonstrate how to interpret dancer’s kinetic affect dividing my analysis in two parts. First, I analyze dance moves through four parameters: posture— whether dancers initiate or finish their gestures in a concave or convex pose; energy—the amount of perceived force dancers use when performing swings and pumps; speed—how fast dancers swing, pulse, or rotate their limbs; and movement type—specific gestures from krump’s vocabulary. Second, I evaluate how, when combined, dance moves and music elicit affective states in audiences by mapping possible core affects into Russel’s circumplex model, which plots values of intensity (high or low) and valence (positive or negative) in a cartesian plane. My analysis demonstrates how dancers combine the four parameters outlined above to construct different affective states and alter music’s intensity.

In an artistic medium where joint gesture produces co-equal audible and visual signals, what does it mean for music to be visual? The marching arts’ concept of “musical visuality” offers one answer. The marching arts are a category of fine arts-adjacent, movement-based youth activities that include marching band, drum corps, colorguard, winterguard, and indoor percussion. Prior to 2020, the musical selections of marching arts groups guided the visual design of shows. Musical elements anchored meticulously rehearsed dance and equipment skills called “twirls” or “spinning.” Spinning could not exist without music. But in 2020, the Winterguard International (WGI) general effect adjudication guidelines introduced a new phrase: musical visuality. In moments of musical visuality, adjudicators assess the efficacy of performance when the design depends predominantly on visual elements, where music is only a background element or when silence is the designer’s tool of choice. Foregrounding musical visuality disentangles visual and musical contributions to a group’s design and performance, and the unlinking of compositional elements previously understood as isomorphic problematizes existing frameworks for assessing formal and semantic audiovisual congruence (Iwamiya 2013).

This presentation analyzes musical visuality in the marching arts through the lens of embodiment and joint gesture. Drawing on theories of musical embodiment (Cox 2016, Simpson-Litke 2021, Hudson 2022), joint action (Matthews et. al 2018, Noble 2018), and choreographic musicality (Leaman 2022), I examine how visual design contributes a unique element that is not available in sound in the marching arts. I first outline intersubjective mechanisms for reliable coordination of simultaneous visual and musical responsibilities in the modern era (post-1971) marching arts as the basis for musical visuality. With embodied meter as my primary analytical foundation, I propose that visual musicality facilitates ensemble coordination and that musical visuality accounts for shared rhythmicity in the absence of external pulse (Wöllner and Keller 2017). I explore how musical visuality conceptually enriches the analysis of audiovisual performance. Spinning in silence is now possible.

Composed in 1917 by Uruguayan pianist Gerardo Matos Rodríguez and premiered in Montevideo by Roberto Firpo’s Orquesta Típica Argentina, the music of “La cumparsita” (“The Little Parade”) has spent just over a century making its way around the globe in the form of thousands of musical arrangements, performances, sound recordings, film scenes, YouTube videos, and more. Dance interpretations of the piece have also been numerous and varied, arising both as spontaneous improvisations on the social dance floors of tango clubs and as meticulous choreographies on the professional stage. In this paper, I provide an in-depth choreomusical analysis of an exceptionally engaging and iconic performance of “La cumparsita” by dancers Cecilia Narova and Juan Carlos Copes from the 1998 motion picture Tango by director Carlos Saura. I begin by defining the positional listening/viewing perspectives that I adopt in my transcription of the performance, identifying the elements I include and exclude. I then explore the intriguing interactions that occur between the dance and the music, showing how movement patterns play with and against musical patterns to create interest and complexity in each large-scale section of the piece.

For instance, my first analytic example shows how the dance choreography begins in close alignment with the music, reinforcing the stability of the metric grid. Then, instead of simply repeating the same choreography when the music repeats, the dancers rechoreograph the passage, providing new footwork that turns attention away from the metric grid and towards the specific pitch patterns of the repeated melody. In another intriguing passage, Narova and Copes execute a repeated three-step pattern that ends each time in a toe tap, alternately crossing in front or behind in order to create a brief dance-music hemiola, where three quarter-note units in the dance are perceived alongside two quarter-note units in the music. Significantly, this 3+3+2 dance pattern references (in augmentation) the habanera rhythm common in tango and Latin music more broadly. Through examples such as these, I reveal how this innovative dance choreography creates an organic union with the music and goes far beyond the “little parade” suggested by its unpresumptuous title.