Finding the Groove: What Is the Best Music Style for Dancing?

What is it about music that gets even non-professionals onto the dance floor, and do disco, funk, or even classical do it best? Four leading choreographers debate their theories, backed by science: "I don't know what house music is that makes me move, but I can't stop it." "And I don't care what I look like. I'm just looking for that...

"I don't know what it is about house music that makes me move, but I can't help it," says Faye Stoeser. And I don't care what I look like. "I'm just looking for it." "If Missy [Elliott's] song comes on, that's me, I'm in the zone," says Daniel "Rhimes" LeConte. “Hip-hop is something deep in the heart that makes you want to move. It has so much rhythm – the heartbeat, the pulse, the bounce – that you feel it in different parts of your body.

What is the best music to dance to? Is the music house, hip hop, disco or funk? Stoeser and Lecointe must have insight because, as performers and choreographers, dance is what they do for a living. When it comes to popular floors, platform DJ Intelligence found that the most requested song by UK DJs last year was Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance With Somebody (with Abba's Dancing Queen second and the Killers' Mr Brightside third). In the US, the number one wedding song on Billboard is Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars. A 2013 Mixmag poll named Daft Punk's One More Time as the ultimate dance song, while Radio 2 listeners voted for Michael Jackson's Billie Jean in 2008.

But what about those for whom dancing is more than just entertainment? When it comes to dancing on stage, there's a lot that isn't driven by the music at all. In the 1940s, American choreographer Merce Cunningham, in collaboration with composer John Cage, began to disconnect dance and music and train dancers in it. Silence Some choreographers use music to create choreography in the studio that is completely different from what they perform on stage. Dance that focuses on musical communication is definitely out of fashion for a while, but there are a number of shows where music is the absolute driving force.

"We won't have a dance until we have the music, which can be scary sometimes because it will be a week before the show, and we're like, 'We haven't found that music yet!'" says Nahum McLean, of BlacBrik Dance Company.

McLean and BlacBrik co-founder Darius Druh had no problem with the score for their current show The Brown Suite, which is being composed by the godfather of funk James Brown — a legendary dancer — with songs by Etta James and Sam Cooke on the soundtrack. "It's so infectious," McLean says of Brown's music. "Sometimes I'll put the music on in my headphones, and I'll try to mentally block out [some of the choreography] or write something, and then I'll be lost and distracted because I'm like, 'This beat is so bad!'

"Sometimes we're too busy dancing in the studio when we should be trying to choreograph," agrees Drove.

Two quotation marks I can see people tapping their feet. This is an involuntary reaction

What is it about funk that makes it so irresistible? "There's something about the bass line and the way it's used in that era, and you can't help it, your body starts to get this natural response," McLean says. “The way it's layered with percussion and horns in the performances, I can see people tapping their feet. It is an involuntary reaction."

There is real science to back this up. Oxford professor Morten Kringlebach is one of the neuroscientists trying to figure out what's weird about funk. He played his test subjects with varying amounts of syncopation—meaning beats that fall between normal pulses—and found an inverted U shape. Simply put, too little syncopation isn't funky enough, it's too much and your body can't connect to the rhythm. James Brown hits the sweet spot. Many other people have also checked out 'Groove' - the official scientific term for the quality of music that makes people dance.

In a 2012 study, cognitive neuroscientist Peter Janata used a variety of measures, including tracking people's spontaneous movements, to find the hippest piece of music. The result: Stevie Wonder's classic Superstitions (1972). Neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin has noted Wonder's drumming and clavinet playing on the song, and how she changes tones so that even though there's a strong pulse, it never sounds monotonous. He calls it "ear candy."

Subjects are placed in brain scanners while listening to groovy music, and areas in their basal ganglia that control motor activity and reward light up. Other elements that have a positive correlation with the groove include: a prominent pulse or rhythm. Lots of different notes per bar. short or emphatic strokes; Harmonic complexity - should be low to moderate. And the presence of low-frequency sounds, that is, heavy bass. Tempo is also important. According to a 2018 analysis, superstition hovers around the 100 bpm mark, slightly slower than the perceived optimum - 107-126bpm. Other studies were conducted on 120bpm.

Hannah Ekhelm, who co-directs Euclideo Dance Company with Stozer, agrees. "One hundred and twenty to 126 bpm, that's when it's really grooving," says Ekholm.

"We do 130 to 135 bpm, but I agree that between 120 and 128 bpm, it feels like it has that steady pulse, but you still have that groove in it," Stoesser adds. A space to play." Eclido specialize in "new way vogue" (the kind of flipping breakthrough Madonna sings about) danced to house music. On stage, their soundtrack isn't just a stable quartet – Ekholm's collaborator Sam Shepherd, AKA Floating Points, writes music for them, including for their latest show Femina – but they're like a beat.

The double quotes of the orchestra are like an engine to me. I can't really access the music to its full potential until I hear it live

It is also more about the technical aspects of music. "When you're in a club atmosphere, you almost transcend each other collectively," Stosser says. I learned this term the other day: "collective excitement", the feeling you get when someone scores a goal in soccer and people lose their senses for a minute. We are trying to bring a part of it into the theater.

I ask LeConte, who is set to star in the hip-hop dance show Ebony Scrooge, where exactly he feels the music. "In the solar plexus," he says. “Hip-hop is a little bit like a speaker for me sometimes. I'm vibrating on different levels: bass, snare, hi-hat, can be isolation in legs, hips, chest.

However, music doesn't need to have a pounding bass line to make you want to dance. When Anna Rose O'Sullivan, a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, says, "The music almost makes me want to get up," she's not talking about techno, she's talking about Tchaikovsky—specifically the Act II dancer in The Nutcracker. “It's the feeling it evokes, the melody, the wave. "It's something deeply romantic, but it has this heft to it," he says. He certainly did, and some of the ballet's most danceable numbers kept The Nutcracker going Christmas after Christmas.

It helps that the music is played live when O'Sullivan performs at the Royal Opera House. "The orchestra is like an engine for me," he says. I can work on something in the studio for months on end, but I can't really reach my full potential until I hear it live. He adds that if someone listens to a piece of music and their hair stands up, but for us it's not just hair, it's everything, every muscle feels alive. Science backs this up: the sense of touch makes you dance to desire, whether it's vibration from a subwoofer or an orchestra in the pit.

There is definitely no single answer to the groove question. James Brown may have taken over the Black Break playlist, but McLean and Drew insist there's no music they can't dance to. "My father is from West Africa, and I have an African dance background. We will always hear the rhythm," says Darweh. We will always hear bass in anything.

Sweet Brown is touring the country through May. Ekleido: Femina is at Gulbenkian Arts, Canterbury, 29-30 October. and The Place, London, November 5-7; Ebony Scrooge is at Sadler's Wells East, London, 24 November to 3 January. The Nutcracker is at London's Royal Opera House from December 3rd to January 13th.