Improvised Drum Solos are particularly difficult to dance to because they may appear unpredictable and because they are, for the most part, fast-paced. I used to feel intimidated by them, but that fear is gone — it has been replaced by the knowledge you'll find in these pages.
Come with me, I will take you on a journey that will tickle your mind, open your ears and take your dance to the next level.
_______________________________________________________________ RHYTHM & DRUM SOLO WORKSHOP | index | part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | ... | part 9 >>
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Photo: Dale LangdonThere are many ways to dance a Drum Solo. My favorite is what I call the Sensual Drum Solo, a luscious and wholesome approach with an emphasis on musicality, showmanship and joy (as opposed to an exclusive focus on articulation or speed). By joy I mean "to move emotion through my body so as to achieve full physical and/or emotional release... Expressing love, anger, sadness, pain, sexuality, humor can all lead to joy"1
To be sensual you need to be in the moment, engaging your senses. Improvised Drum Solos are particularly difficult to dance to because they may appear unpredictable and because they are, for the most part, fast-paced. It's hard to relax, enjoy yourself and connect to those around you when you are not sure of what's been played for you... when far from feeling that you are dancing with the drum you feel attacked by it.
If you've ever been afraid of improvising a drum solo (or any song for that matter); if you've ever frozen on the dance floor; if you feel nervous about dancing to live music or to a song you never heard before... FEAR NO MORE! Come with me, I will take you on a journey that will tickle your mind, open your ears and take your dance to the next level.
Action Plan
First off, let's take a look at the elements we will study. This knowledge will make you comfortable in any Drum Solo situation:
An understanding of the Rhythms.
A knowledge of the dance vocabulary that works with each Rhythm.
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_____ 1. Carol Fox Prescott, Breathing, Awareness and Joy.
I've seen beginner bellydancers who happened to be musicians and, because of their musicality, their performances have been quite enjoyable, even if their technique was very basic. On the other hand, whenever you see a dancer who can't hear the music (no matter how good her technique is), Don't you get the same feeling you do when someone runs her nails on a chalkboard?
The basis of a Bellydance Drum Solo is Middle Eastern Rhythms. If you want to learn how to dance, not only to any drum solo but to ANY bellydance song, your number one task is to learn the rhythms: understand them, identify them, feel them.
Why would you want to learn about rhythm?
So you get better at improvising and never freeze again.
To accelerate years of training.
To get a better understanding of what you are dancing. Knowledge is power.
To learn some rules and basics. Only by learning rules and basics are we empowered to break them.
So you can create your own dances, not just learn other people's choreographies.
So you feel competent among musicians.
Because I danced in the darkness for many years and I don’t want you to do the same. I want to help you turn on the lights.
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"Music was my first love and I was led to dance through that, although I was a miserable failure at playing any of it myself at the keyboard. I am reminded of Mozart, who said that he really cared more for dancing than for music... But I came to love dancing very much, almost as much as music." -Doris Humphrey
I sat in front of my 6-inch blue piano and played a melody. I edited it until I was satisfied. I wrote down the musical notes and signed my creation with a glamourous version of my name: Blanche Órti. After looking at it for a few minutes, a voice inside my head said: "Who do you think you are to write a song?" Quickly, I tore it into little pieces feeling a shame that to this day brings tears to my eyes. I was seven years old.
Sandwiched between my pianist sister and my rockstar brother I grew up thinking something was wrong with me. They swam in the abstract and invisible world of music. I felt blind in it. They played songs. I drew all day long, comfortable in the visual realm, where time didn't rule. I held on to the belief that talent is born, not made, that I was born a lost cause. I had heard my mom say of too many singers on TV things like: "She can't sing! She has no talent!" What if I, too, was unaware of my own incompetence?
And so I decided I could never be a musician. But I loved music. "Blind" and all, I still took piano, mandolin and guitar classes throughout my childhood. In adolescence I became a fan of the more sophisticated forms of rock—the ones that had odd time signatures, jazz influences or Middle Eastern scales.
Carrying my secret wound I embarked into my dance training. When I moved to New York, I also took regular singing and music classes and began to fill the gaps of my western music knowledge. I learned to sight read. I learned about time signatures and modes... oh happiness! I loved the patterns, the mathematics of it.
Feeling
But the true eye-opener has happened as I learn the importance of feeling. Sure, it was fun to decode what I was listening to, but it's even more fun to understand why and how music stirs feelings in humans. Only recently did I finally ask: "What are these rhythms and time signatures for, anyway?" As I understand it, the use of rhythms is not just for a fun mental exercise, merely because we can group elements in two or four or ten. Each rhythm holds a powerful and expressive personality. Rhythm holds the basic makeup of what a piece of music feels like. And rhythms hold the key to being a great dancer.
I see rhythm as the skeleton of a song, the basic structure that holds everything together. Without bones, we would be an amorphous pile of soft tissue on the floor. Rhythm gives songs their shape, the way bones give us ours.
The most basic drawing of a person is the stick figure. A stick figure shows no muscles, no facial features, no clothes—it is the simplest representation of the skeletal system. But even stick figures can be very eloquent:
In the same manner, even the most basic rhythmic structure can be very expressive. Take for instance a time signature of 4 beats per measure (meaning that the rhythm repeats its cycle every 4 counts). This is the most common rhythmic structure in western music. It feels very natural, it's very stable, familiar, predictable. It feels like a contained story, such as the cycle of life: birth - growth - reproduction - death. It has four components like the seasons, the phases of the moon, the cardinal points, the four mental functions, the legs of a table, the walls of a common room, the four elements (fire, earth, water, air) or the Sex and the City chicks representing the KWML personality types. In Tarot, 4 is the card of The Emperor, the male creator. 4 is said to be the number of order in the universe. Most songs you've heard have a rhythm of 4.
Songs in this video: Arcade Fire - Neon's Bible Amon Tobin - Proper Hoodidge Dennis Dunaway Project - Kandahar Gary Jules - Mad World Black Eyed Peas - Where is the love? Dusty Springfield - Son of a Preacher Man Moontan - Escalate Tim Rayborn - Ifrit Gorillaz - Superfast Jellyfish
Notice how much heavier the "1" is. This heavier note is called the downbeat. The way a conductor marks this time signature is a reflection of how it feels: he moves his hand down on 1, to the side on 2, to the other side on 3, and up on 4, to begin the process again.
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In my previous entry, we listened to several songs set to a rhythm that repeats every four beats. If those songs were represented in Western musical notation, you would see this:
The 4/4 symbol is called time signature. It indicates the meter of a musical composition. Meter is the number of beats per measure and the time value assigned to each of those beats.
In this case, the upper 4 represents what we have been talking about: that the rhythm of these songs has four beats per measure.
For our purposes, we don't need to learn about the lower numeral but let's define it anyway: it indicates which note value (time value) constitutes one beat. In this case it's a quarter note (remember those pesky fractions in grade school?) This is the quarter note symbol:
So... 4/4 means that for each measure there will be 4 (upper numeral) quarter notes (lower numeral).
This is the eighth note symbol: An eighth note is half the time of a quarter note. A time signature of 9/8 would indicate that there are 9 eighth notes per measure:
To make things easier to read, eighth notes get tied in groups:
The beauty of Western musical notation is that anybody who has studied it—regardless of language and country of origin—is able to read it and interpret it the same. A Japanese violinist can play with an American orchestra, even if he doesn't speak English. But if I go to Germany and tell a bellydance student to do a chassé, she might look at me as if I had two heads. Why? Because she calls that movement "step-step-step". Dance doesn't have a standardized nomenclature*, let alone a written symbolic system**. But in the music world, on paper, 4/4 means the same whether it's printed in Europe, America or the Middle East.
Which brings me to my disclaimer:
Here (on this continent), in the "classroom," we analyze and separate elements into neat packages. We give things names. We do it so we can teach and learn faster. But the origins of this music and dance are quite different. Raqs Sharqi (Oriental Dance) was originally done only in homes, passed on by imitation, and learned the way we learn to speak: naturally and from childhood. And Middle Eastern music has grown organically in a vast number of countries and cultures. Therefore, you may find that:
Similar rhythms overlap
A rhythm may have different names
The same name may be used by some to call a rhythm, by others to call a style of dance, by others to refer to a music style.***
I will be teaching you the names as they make the most sense to me, giving you footnotes with other names you may encounter. The names are secondary, the most important thing is to develop your musical sensibility.
Now that we got that out of the way, let's mention that the basic Bellydance Rhythms in 4/4 meter are: Baladi, Maqsum and Saiidi.
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* The dance form that comes closer to a universal nomenclature is classical ballet, but even this is far from being so.
** Labanotation is a system for body movement notation but, in actuality, very few people know and use it. It costs thousands of dollars to get a dance notated by a professional, plus film and written notes are necessary to supplement the information.
*** This is a fascinating subject. I just took a weeklong workshop with Morocco where she and Tarik Sultan explained many questions that had been burning my mind. I can't wait for her to finish her book. In the mean time, you can read her informative articles.
;)
Monday, May 3, 2010 at 10:47AM 
Improvised Drum Solos are particularly difficult to dance to because they may appear unpredictable and because they are, for the most part, fast-paced. I used to feel intimidated by them, but that fear is gone — it has been replaced by the knowledge you'll find in these pages. 
