Is music necessary?

 

“Music can drive a young dancer into what I call the movement machine.” By Helen Pickett, who leads class at The School at Jacob’s Pillow.

http://www.dancemagazine.com/issues/May-2014/In-Training-The-Sounds-of-Silence

 

Some may consider music as distraction from deeply digging into one’s arts, hindering dancers from creating their own styles, and showing the sense of personality which is unique through artistic choices.

 

 

In addition, music as accompaniment or dance as accompaniment sometimes fixes the rhythm of both of them. This discourages dancers from maintaining their own tempo. On the other hand, practically, dancers practice with music accompaniment for a long time may be driven by the music solely, but not the way how they dance, sometimes they may be discouraged from maintaining a consistent tempo by themselves without music. Mentioned by Risa Steinberg, a former Limón dancer and now a teacher at Juilliard, who encourage dancers to practice in silence sometimes, that at a performance in Limón’s 1967 Psalm, the music cut out during an ensemble section, but the dancers kept going, and when the music started again, they were exactly with it.