Dancing out of Square > Endeavors, Spring 2000

LINKS

Country/Western
Dance

Dance floor
etiquette
and tips

UNC-CH
Music Dept

Dancing out of Square > 1 > 2

For country to be “danceable,” Neal says, it must meet specific metric requirements. Most importantly, the meter must be duple, that is, it must have two or a multiple of two beats per measure. Why two? Look down. Two feet, Neal says, require two beats—dance steps are inherently linked to the human body’s left-right symmetry, such that two beats equal the amount of time it takes to move from the right foot to the left.

All dances are built on patterns of strong and weak beats. Neal says that if you violate this beat pattern, you’re dancing “out of time” (and on your partner’s toes, to boot). But here’s the catch: you might dance to the strong and weak beat patterns all night without matching the music’s measures or phrases.

Let’s say one unit of strong-weak beats equals a half-bar of music. The half-bar then becomes the only level at which the dance pattern must correspond to the music. Above that hierarchical level, Neal says, country music and dance patterns don’t have to align. In fact, she found that most don’t.

Swing by a country dance hall next Saturday night and you’ll see two basic dance styles: freestyle partner dances, such as two-step, polka, swing, and waltz, and choreographed line dances, including a tried-and-true crowd pleaser called the “Tush Push.”

Consider the two-step, a freestyle partner dance. The basic two-step dance pattern lasts six beats, but two-step music has only four beats per measure. So the dance pattern occupies one and a half measures of music. The dance pattern and musical measure “align,” or begin at the same time, every three measures.

But three measures don’t make a metric unit of music, Neal says. Instead, the dance pattern overlaps the musical meter, ending at different places each time the pattern repeats. “A well-executed two-step,” Neal says, “seems to glide over the music above the framework of the meter.”

What about line dancing? Dancers line up across the floor and move to a choreographed pattern that repeats throughout the course of the song. A given song will often have its own line dance. The steps vary widely from dance to dance, as does the dance pattern’s length.

All the line-dance patterns Neal studied were an even number of beats in length. Here again, two feet require two beats. And like freestyle partner dances, line dances don’t tend to align with the prototypical square country structure.

Instead, nearly 80 percent of line dances have irregular pattern lengths, meaning they’re not equal to the duple lengths of 16, 32, or 64 beats. Their patterns may be as short as 14 beats or as long as 116.

Imagine that a line dance pattern ends with a left-footed stomp. That stomp’s position will shift, relative to the meter, as the song continues. The result, Neal says, is two audible meters: one in the music and one in the dance.

To further complicate things, metric structure sometimes varies as the song develops. Dancing an irregular-length line dance to such a song creates a multitude of rhythmic and metrical interpretations. Neal says that in some cases, musical and dance meters never align during the course of a song.

Good dancers learn to enjoy these polyrhythms. “We’re capable of locking into whatever repeating pattern is present and accepting that as the pulse of the event,” Neal says. “Consider a jazz tune where the drummer sets up two rhythmic patterns that weave together and play off each other. Dancing can be like being that drummer.”

What does this mean to the artists? Since a country dance doesn’t require a square tune, Neal says that songwriters and performers can employ a broad range of techniques to shape a song as they see fit. Meanwhile, line-dance choreographers are free to create interesting dances without being locked to the music’s meter. Because the music and dance have evolved together, neither restricts the other.

Seems country is more sophisticated than a lot of folks thought. As Neal puts it, “the same techniques present in Bach’s and Brahms’s music appear in country music.”

Mind you, country has never been the darlin’ of music theorists. “Country scholars tend to study culture, not music,” Neal says. “And there’s a social stigma that country music is simple, white-trash, and not worthy of investigation in any area.”

Academic indifference and the occasional knock-down dragout—a tough research atmosphere? Maybe. But Jocelyn Neal isn’t about to be daunted. She came to dance.

What do you think of this story?
Let us know.