Re: dancers

[Travis Hartnett <tiktok@sprintmail.com>]

Hence the "in my experience..." preface to my comments.  I'd attend 
rehearsals, and more than half the time no music was used while they were 
working up the pieces.  There's nothing wrong with this, it's just a 
different way of working.  But, if as a musician you're expecting there to 
be sync between you and the dancers, then you'd be disappointed.  For the 
live music I provided, they'd usually indicate a piece of one of my 
improvised CDs and say "Something in that vein..."  Sometimes I'd get 
instructions for "build as we got to this point"  but nothing more 
explicit.  These were not Bob Fosse pieces.

I'd put together CD-R's with the program music for these groups also, and 
I'd see multiple performances, and there was no great effort expended to 
match the running lengths of the pieces many times.  If the dancers 
"finished" ten or twenty seconds before the music, they made do, or the 
soundman would be instructed to quickly fade down the music.

>first off, I think that's not fair to modern dancers to lump them all in 
>a group and judge them en masse.  The same thing could be >said that 
>"loop based musician's can't perform in real-time with a whole band and 
>work with tempo changes".