Abstract:

Musicality in dance does not need music. ¿How is musicality apparent in the dance studio, and to what extent is a social construct? We define musicality as a social skill. We analize how dancers share their artistic judgement when narrating the choreographical tasks that take place when rehearsing a new piece. Our claim for this paper is that musicality is part of a vocabulary of motives as artistic justification. As a social skill, musicality relies on two other social skills, listening and fisicality. To capture the variability of the phenomenon, we have observed what happens when the choreographer gives instructions and directs a rehearsal within a cognitive ethnography of a British neoclasical dance company. We selected from the general corpus of data 11 interviews to the company members, which we analized with grounded theory principles. Our findings show how our unit of analysis must be the interaction among dancers in a self-regulated coupling. Thus, we show how musicality is a social hability that can only work in a network of social skills, together with fisicality and listening.  It is, in all, the local product of distributed cognition in the dance studio.

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