The paper analyzes in three selected choreographies how bodily
motion represents musical rhythm in contemporary dance. It tries
to understand how do dancers interact rhythmically with music.
The analyses will be performed strictly from a musical perspective
and the following issues will be addressed:
1- Does the phrasing of the dance coincide with that of the music?
2- How does the phrasing in dance get affected by different rhythmic
organizations in music? That is, how does the phrasing differ
when music has a regular, does not have a regular, or even has
no perceptible groups such as moment form music?
3- To what beat level does a dancer synchronize her/his bodily
motion? The process used to analyze the choreographies will consist
of digitized video excerpts of the choreographies, synchronized
to an oscillographic and spectrographic representation of the
music they are set to. The oscillographic and spectrographic representations
will help discerning the musical group boundaries as well as their
internal rhythmic articulation. When mapped against the images,
they will help to dissect how the interaction between bodily motion
and music is performed.