VIDEO: Beautiful Rumba Dance Performance

The judges were in awe after watching this couple’s Rumba dance performance.

Dancing takes passion, before anything else.

You have to, of course, feel the music one way or the other, but practice is the most important part.

One has to try, fail, try again, fail better and do so until they get it right!

According to Wikipedia,rhythm and dance are deeply linked in history and practice. The American dancer Ted Shawn wrote; “The conception of rhythm which underlies all studies of the dance is something about which we could talk forever, and still not finish.”

A musical rhythm requires two main elements; first, a regularly-repeating pulse that establishes the tempo and, second, a pattern of accents and rests that establishes the character of the metre or basic rhythmic pattern. The basic pulse is roughly equal in duration to a simple step or gesture.

Just as musical rhythms are defined by a pattern of strong and weak beats, so repetitive body movements often depends on alternating “strong” and “weak” muscular movements. Given this alternation of left-right, of forward-backward and rise-fall, along with the bilateral symmetry of the human body, it is natural that many dances and much music are in duple and quadruple meter.

However, since some such movements require more time in one phase than the other – such as the longer time required to lift a hammer than to strike – some dance rhythms fall equally naturally into triple metre.

Occasionally, as in the folk dances of the Balkans, dance traditions depend heavily on more complex rhythms. Further, complex dances composed of a fixed sequence of steps always require phrases and melodies of a certain fixed length to accompany that sequence.

The very act of dancing, the steps themselves, generate an “initial skeleton of rhythmic beats” that must have preceded any separate musical accompaniment, while dance itself, as much as music, requires time-keeping just as utilitarian repetitive movements such as walking, hauling and digging take on, as they become refined, something of the quality of dance.

Musical accompaniment therefore arose in the earliest dance, so that ancient Egyptians attributed the origin of the dance to the divine Athotus, who was said to have observed that music accompanying religious rituals caused participants to move rhythmically and to have brought these movements into proportional measure.

Scholes, not a dancer but a musician, offers support for this view, stating that the steady measures of music, of two, three or four beats to the bar, its equal and balanced phrases, regular cadences, contrasts and repetitions, may all be attributed to the “incalculable” influence of dance upon music.

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze relates how a study of the physical movements of pianists led him “to the discovery that musical sensations of a rhythmic nature call for the muscular and nervous response of the whole organism”, to develop “a special training designed to regulate nervous reactions and effect a co-ordination of muscles and nerves” and ultimately to seek the connections between “the art of music and the art of dance”.

He concluded that “musical rhythm is only the transposition into sound of movements and dynamisms spontaneously and involuntarily expressing emotion”.