Pacific Northwest Ballet included Jessica Lang’s ZigZag in their All Lang performance this year. While it’s not as directly Ballroom-related as last year’s performance of Nine Sinatra Songs, it was a ballet danced to and inspired by Tony Bennett songs. And similar to Sinatra, Bennett’s songs are often well-suited to Ballroom dances, especially Swing and Foxtrot.

That, combined with some of the work I’ve been doing for other dances choreographed in a very different way, led me down the rabbit hole of exploring the music used in this dance and its history. I think it’s fun to find ideas for music to dance to in many different ways, so please indulge me while I use this as an excuse to highlight some Tony Bennett songs.

The Music

Apparently, the original version of ZigZag, performed by the American Ballet Theatre, was danced to Bennett’s recorded tracks. The version I experienced featured solo piano and was significantly reworked, using a different set of songs (as far as I can tell, only four songs overlap between the two performances). While I have a bit of retroactive FOMO about not having experienced the original version, this does give me eighteen Bennett songs to explore, rather than the tenish that either version would have provided on its own.

Here is the music4dance link showing the songs from both versions of ZigZag. I marked them all as Ballet — a dance that I added support for, along with a number of other “performance” dances, when I thought I’d see more So You Think You Can Dance (may it rest in peace) performances to catalog. I added partner dances to some of them as they made sense to me. Please feel free to vote on dances for these songs as well.

Nine Sinatra Songs

Since I was taking a look at “Nine Sinatra Songs” for this post, I noticed that I hadn’t added Ballet votes for those songs, and I also hadn’t added the comment with the piece’s and choreographer’s name (since I hadn’t established that convention yet). That is now corrected.

UX Questions

All of this, aside from being a bit of a diversion from the usual, led me to some small, rough spots in the music4dance user experience that I’m not entirely sure how to resolve.

The main thing is that when I’m viewing song lists like those discussed above, I’d really like to see dance tags and comments in the main search results. But things are pretty cluttered as they are, and songs with a bunch of tags end up hogging screen real estate.

I’ve considered making columns customizable. I could also limit what you see per row by default and add an expando so you can see more without going to the song details page. But I’m not sure how much that would help. I could also do the same kind of limiting and just force you to open the song details page if you want to see much more than title/artist and dances. Please let me know if you have any thoughts about this part of the user experience (or any other parts for that matter). Also, I’m always interested in how people are using the site – that’s almost as useful as specific suggestions in solving issues like this.

Step of the Month

The “Step of the Month” for June is to check your account management page. It is nice to see the songs another user has tagged. This information is available only to other logged-in members of the community, so please consider making your information available to the community by checking the “Share my Profile” option to improve other members’ experience (the alternative is that your votes and tags are attributed to an anonymous user, which is much less friendly).