A Chicago swing dancer organized a weekly solo jazz practice, which has brought the focus back to my feet. The rhythm of the upper body originates in the feet. I concentrated on feeling my weight melt into the floor. Two points of instruction, which I mentioned in posts from a little while ago, resonate with this. Kerry Kapaku described the dancer’s foot fall like the expanding foot of an elephant. Gabby Cooke described the foundational movement of dance as the complete transfer from one foot to the other, with the descending ball of the foot receiving the full weight of the body before the sole descends. With both of these concepts, there is a more subtle interaction with the musical beat. If one uses a stompier footfall, the percussive impact of the foot can match almost exactly to the beat. But with a squishier step, the rhythmic matching becomes a little vaguer, in a good way. The rhythmic matches less with the percussive step, and more with the vertical momentum traveling through the body to the floor. It appears groovier and more grounded. The rhythm also visually disperses through the body, and may cover the whole note.

My friend Sharon recently describe her view of the origin point of rhythm. She named the core. If rhythm originates in the core, the rest of the body will follow. It takes away the problem of forcing rhythm into the arms. The dispersed footfall agrees with this idea. The squishier step requires that one controls the vertical momentum of the core. The muscles in the legs slow down the descent of the core. Then, when the step reaches the bottom, in a fully orthogonal relationship to the floor, the floor reverses the energy back upwards, the big leg muscles regulate the energy up into the core, which then disperses the energy through the body.

This fancy, semi-mathematical description of the physics of dance is practically worthless. No dancer of any style would describe it this way. As a point of instruction, the concept can be stated in a sentence or two, but incorporating it into a natural movement takes a good long while. One can also dance quite well with flat foot fall. I’ve found the concept to transfer directly to the bounce of hip hop. The seasoned hip hop dancers I have observed have dynamic foot falls, and the rhythm visually travels upward and then outward from their core.