I just go for it.” “If a Missy [Elliott] track comes on, that’s me, I’m in the zone,” says Dannielle “Rhimes” Lecointe. It has so many rhythms to it – a heartbeat, a pulse, a ricochet – that you feel in so many different places of your body.” What is the best music to dance to? Is it house music, it is hip-hop, is it disco or funk?
Stoeser and Lecointe should have some insight since, as performers and choreographers, dancing is what they do for a living. When it comes to popular floorfillers, the DJ Intelligence platform found the most-requested track from UK DJs last year was Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody (with Abba’s Dancing Queen second, and Mr Brightside by the Killers third). In the US, Billboard’s top wedding song is Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars.
A 2013 Mixmag poll named Daft Punk’s One More Time as the ultimate dance track, whereas Radio 2 listeners in 2008 voted for Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. But what about those for whom dancing is more than recreation? When it comes to dance on stage, there is plenty that isn’t driven by music at all.
Back in the 1940s, the US choreographer Merce Cunningham began to disconnect dance and music in his collaborations with the composer John Cage, rehearsing the dancers in silence. Some choreographers use music to create dance in the studio that is totally different from what they’ll perform to on stage. Dance that’s focused on musical connection definitely went out of fashion for a while, but there are a bunch of shows coming up where music is the absolute driving force.
In performances, I can see people tapping their feet. It’s an involuntary reaction.” There’s actual science that bears this out. Oxford professor Morten Kringelbach is one neuroscientist who set out to pin down what’s so funky about funk.
He played his test subjects funk drum breaks with different amounts of syncopation – meaning the beats that land between the regular pulse – and found an inverted-U shape; simply put, too little syncopation equals not funky enough, too much and your body can’t hook into the rhythm. James Brown hits the sweet spot. Plenty of others have also investigated “groove” – that’s the official scientific term for the quality in music that makes people want to dance.
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