Musicalities and the Moving Body in Western Concert Dance

Musicality is an important concept in the history of choreography in Western concert dance, including social, ballet, modern, and postmodern dance. There are many different ways of being musical when moving, or creating movement, or training dancers. This chapter addresses the perspectives of makers of dance performance and its audiences. It performs as both a microhistoriography and personal monograph of the author’s experiences witnessing and creating musicality in dance. Musicality in dance exists as a multiplicity, and both music and dance are nonlinguistic forms of communication. That distinction is an important one when thinking of dance and music as forms of communication. Dance when put with music dialectically produces new meanings through a complex production of knowledge formation. This chapter examines that formation.