Tag Archives: Ballet

Music and Dance

Jessica Lang’s ZigZag – Ballet and Bennett

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.

The first few Tony Bennett songs used in ZigZag
The first few Tony Bennett songs used in ZigZag

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).

Nine Sinatra Songs – Ballroom inspired Ballet

Pacific Northwest Ballet included Twila Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs as part of their Director’s Choice performance this year. I’m not in any way qualified to review a Ballet performance, but I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and had a great time playing with the Ballroom-inspired aspects of the dancing as I watched the…

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Dance Tags

Dance tags are the heart of the music4dance database. They are the glue that holds dance styles and songs together. These tags are crowd-sourced from our users, our friends’ catalogs, and from public sources. The more that our members vote on dances, the more diverse our catalog will become. There are a number of places…

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New Dance(s): Pattern Dances including Line Dance and Set Partner Dances

I’ve been seeing more interest in what I’ll generically call pattern dances. By this, I mean dances that are set to specific choreography and then danced socially, either in a formation (e.g., line dances) or as partner dances. Since this strays far from my own dance experience, I am struggling both with terminology and how…

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Music and Dance

Nine Sinatra Songs – Ballroom inspired Ballet

Pacific Northwest Ballet included Twila Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs as part of their Director’s Choice performance this year. I’m not in any way qualified to review a Ballet performance, but I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and had a great time playing with the Ballroom-inspired aspects of the dancing as I watched the show unfold. For me, the idea that the dancing was inspired by ballroom rather than in any way attempting to choreograph actual ballroom dance steps on ballet dancers is what made it work (this is the issue I sometimes have with partner dance in Broadway musicals). It was obvious in several of the nine pieces that  Ballroom dance inspired the piece, and the upper body shaping and movements felt quite ballroomesque throughout the performance.

On returning home, I hoped to find a resource that listed the dances that Tharp drew from for each of the first eight pieces (the ninth is a reprise group number), but I failed. The notes from some of the performances mention the roots of one or two dances, but it seems like, for the most part, they name the same couple of songs. So, my guess is that even a thorough search of those through the years wouldn’t yield a complete list. As an aside, it was fun to jump down the rabbit hole of the French Apache Dance that Tharp drew from for the choreography for That’s Life. If someone has such a reference, please let me know.

In the meantime, I will take this as inspiration to play a little with the possibilities of music and dance. Sinatra is already well represented in the music4dance catalog, with 166 songs listed before I started filling out the few missing entries from the ballet. But I’ve always thought of dancing Foxtrot to Sinatra or maybe Swing. In the ballet, Tango, Rumba, and Samba were definitely represented. So, I took a few minutes to see what the music4dance community has to say about dancing to this music.

If you go to the Frank Sinatra artist page, you’ll see Slow Foxtrot, Lindy Hop, Rumba, Castle Foxtrot, East Coast Swing, Jive, Quickstep, Peabody, West Coast Swing, Single Swing, Slow Waltz, Balboa, Bolero, Bossa Nova, Viennese Waltz, and Blues all represented.

And here’s a custom music4dance playlist that includes all eight songs (although one song is the Perry Como version since the Sinatra version isn’t available on Spotify or iTunes).

A snapshot of the eight songs used in "Nine Sinatra Songs"
The eight songs used in “Nine Sinatra Songs” as shown on music4dance.

Are there other partner dances that Tharp drew from in this work that we should represent in music4dance? Are there other Ballroom-inspired ballets out there worth viewing? Do they use different music that you’d like to add to the catalog? Are there other playlists that you’d like to overlay the music4dance information on, like I did with this one? If you have ideas about this post or the site, please comment below or use other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.