Listening to the Worlds Inside and Out

Peggy Baker, 2009

The sounds of the world reach us via an elegant, complex and fragile system referred to as hearing. When we direct our attention to our hearing we engage in the act of listening. Likewise, our nervous system delivers us proprioceptive information concerning equilibrium and the movement of our joints that we instinctively use to guide the pathway, tempo modulation, and co-ordination of an action. When we direct our attention to our proprioception we engage in an act that is also referred to, among dancers, as listening; listening to our body. Both modes of listening, to the world outside of us, and to the inner world of our own bodies, are crucial to the refinement of our expressive capabilities.

As dancers we attend to the words and sounds in our imaginations with a quality that is virtually indistinguishable from the act of listening with our ears. We also listen to the bodies of the dancers with whom we are improvising, rehearsing or performing, employing the same quality and sensitivity as when we direct our awareness to the inner experience of our own dancing. And we listen to the musical score or soundtrack while we dance as though it were the product of our own imagination.

In rehearsal, listening to our body frees our intuition and invites responsiveness, setting up the possibility for bold experiments in approach. In class, it allows for shifts out of habit and into new, refreshed or deepened understanding of technical elements.  In performance, listening to our body enables inspired and nuanced variations on action, intention, quality and musicality that in no way infringe on the choreography. The ability to shift the style and focus of one’s listening – to attend with awareness and sensitivity to the worlds inside and out, and to be responsive to what is perceived – is one of the hallmarks of great dancing.

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A visitor from outside of the dance profession might be surprised to hear the astonishing range of vocalizing that goes on in class and rehearsal as movement is being invented, explored, practiced or taught. Technique teachers, rehearsal directors, choreographers and dancers may all vocalize extemporaneously, using what I’ll call sounding, to capture the dynamic quality of a movement through an infinite array of possibilities – howling, buzzing, humming, growling, grating, rustling, clicking, swishing, whipping, thudding, squeaking, creaking, cracking, trilling, roaring and on and on – sharing complex and explicit information about movement through the pitch, timbre, volume, duration, rhythm and dynamic of their voices. While images and metaphors used to explain movement ideas are very often subjective and require reinterpretation by the dancer, sounding can deliver immediate, direct, and objective information having to do with the experience of the movement.

Imitating the sounding that was demonstrated to us while we try out new material ourselves, even quietly or in our imagination, can be a powerful tool for distilling and embodying the dynamic impulse and overall shape of a movement or phrase. As we explore, develop, and refine anything from an individual technical element to a complete choreography, engaging in our own vivid, precise and spontaneous inner soundscape can help us fully embody the dancing over a career span of classes, rehearsals, and performances.

Parallel to the specialized body listening of the dancer and to their audible or [AB1]inaudible sounding is the score: the music, soundtrack or soundscape – live, recorded or a combination; composed, improvised or anything in between; or simply the shared silence and ambient sound of the performance space – that the audience and dancers each experience in relation to the dance. The dancer may have an exacting relationship with the music that requires them to tune in to precise details of rhythm or melody, a more open relationship that requires them to arrive at landmarks in the score at a given moment, or the score may have no relationship with choreography other than being a parallel performance event. So the dancer may need to listen to, simply hear, or even ignore the score at the same time that they are engaged with the inner soundscape of their dancing, the inner listening to their body that informs a physical experience of their dancing, and the empathetic listening outside of themselves that sustains their connections to other performers.

The dancer commands awareness on many levels simultaneously, listening in different manners to the worlds inside and out, even while they navigate a host of other concerns demanded of them by the choreography.