The eccentric dance moves of Talking Heads frontman and visual artist, David Byrne, reveal a deeper expressive logic and meaning beyond being avant-garde. In the critically acclaimed 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense, Byrne uses distinct dance gestures for each of the songs. One of these songs includes “Once in a Lifetime.” Building on Gardner and Shea 2022, who focus on semi-spontaneous gestures in popular music performance and how they draw attention to the relationships between the music’s meaning and structure, I focus on how the planned idiosyncratic dance moves of Byrne can be analyzed and understood. I argue that Byrne’s distinctive gestures/dance moves, usually thought to be spontaneous, embody musical form, meaning, and encourage audience participation, as seen in this live performance of “Once in a Lifetime.”

Throughout the performance, Byrne uses four gestural categories: flailing/falling/shaking movements, gesticulative gestures, “preacher hands,” and repetitive cyclical gestures. Rather than appearing randomly, these categories align consistently with specific formal sections of the song, creating a choreographic map of its verse–chorus design. Beyond formal structure, gesture also contributes to the song’s narrative and lyric expression. Through lyric-based gesticulation, Byrne makes references to religious ecstasy, and preacher-like movements, embodying the meaning of “Once in a Lifetime.” The recurring “preacher hands” gesture further highlights the chorus as the song’s central message while inviting audience participation. David Byrne’s performance technique demonstrates how gesture can function not only as an accompaniment but as an integral component of musical expression and musical understanding.

In Lully’s operas, the passacaille symbolized love. Venus, Love, Armide, Scylla, and Galatée all conveyed, through dancers’ bodies, the pleasures of love, marriage, and seduction in passacailles. For these, Lully follows the same script: a continuing variation divided into mostly symmetrical couplets, alternating between tutti and trio forces, and supported by a descending minor tetrachord in the bass. Although Lully conveys love through similar musical means, his choreographers nuanced the emotion’s affective quality through dance—depicting the granular manner with which they construed love in their craft. In Persée (Act V, scene 8), for example, Guillaume-Luois Pécour depicted courtship and passion with an excursion through the contrast between balance and gravitational pull between two dancers. In Armide (Act V, scene 2), by contrast, Pécour’s choreography depicts stark variances in arousal and valence while Anthony L’Abbé’s one provides amore constrained and controlled depiction of love.

In this paper, I analyze these three choreographies to show how dancers represent different facets of love through kinetic affect. According to theories of kinetic affect, a dancer communicates their innermost feelings with their movements, which audiences construct as emotions through kinesthetic empathy. To interpret a dancer’s kinetic affect, I provide a two-part framework. First, I analyze dance through four parameters: posture—how dancers carry their bodies; energy—the perceived force in their movements; velocity—the dancer’s speed according to the number of steps per measure; and movement type—a dancer’s vocabulary of gestures. Second, I map my experience of core affect into Russel’s circumplex model (Russell 1980) to evaluate how, when combined, dance and music elicit affect. By playing with the symmetry between periods and phrases in dance and music, exploiting the synchrony between a dancer’s movement and salient metrical or harmonic events, and controlling the quality and speed of dance steps in space,choreographers manipulate viewers’ core affect through kinetic affect.

In this presentation, I focus on understanding participant, i.e. performer and audience, interaction in live performances of salsa dura, a style of salsa music that was created and popularized in the 1970s in New York City. I take inspiration from jazz scholarship on improvisation and interaction (Monson 1996, Berliner 1994), as well as ethnomusicological research on salsa (Washburne 1998, 2008; Waxer 2002), to form a holistic and culturally situated analytical method.

I analyze three songs from performances by established salsa bands––Don Perignon Y La Puertorriqueña, the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, and the Fania All Stars––and consider the factors that influence what musicians play on stage, how they play it, and how they interact with one another and the audience within a framework of musical conversation. I explore both musical and social parameters in these examples: form, audience role, physicality, sonic space, and groove. I show how ensemble musicians dance and move in relation to a song’s form; how an ensemble responds sonically and physically to support improvised solos; and how the identities of participants can subtly disrupt a groove, reinforcing elements of cultural and musical fusion that are key to salsa. I focus on videos of live performance, as an audiovisual format provides a more complete picture of salsa performance traditions. I supplement this original analysis with interviews conducted in the spring of 2025 with professional salsa musicians, foregrounding a practitioner-centered approach.

Through these analyses, I seek to provide a theoretical framework for salsa as a participatory genre that creates communal musical experiences through the process of performance. I show that audience members are part of the expression of this music and that interactions between participants are key to salsa’s identity, affirming the importance of musical analyses of salsa that take into account cultural context and performance traditions.