Dynamic Attending and The Manipulation of Timespace

This chapter introduces how dancers perceive and experience the dance/music as it is happening in real time and space. The first half introduces the many layers of music that dancers must attend to while listening and dancing, and the process of dynamic attending by which they attend to these layers. The second half introduces the concept of timespace to explain how dancers manipulate this physiological phenomenon to create different feelings in a dance at the small-scale level of the measure (expanded in chapter 4 as expressive/microtiming), the mid-scale level of formal sections (expanded in chapter 3 as hypermetric expectation), and at the large-scale level of the song itself.

• Timespace in dance/music is experienced as a simultaneity of the dancers’ cognition and embodiment of time streams with proprioception, the physiological sense of the position of the body in space and the force and strength employed in its movement. I conceived of this use of the term to explain how dancers control their bodies as instruments wielded through space and time. Timespace manipulation addresses dancers’ command over when, and which, movements are placed in time and space to create the possibility of flow; it speaks to the magical moments that draw dancers to particular partners, especially for particular songs. How the feeling of timespace is manipulated is the answer to the central question of my dissertation: How are dancers musical?

 

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