Can Dance Reflect the Structural and Expressive Qualities of Music? A Perceptual Experiment on Balanchine's Choreography of Mozart's Divertimento No. 15

Abstract

A perceptual experiment investigated the structural and expressive mappings between music and dance. The Stimulus materials were based on the Minuetto from W. A. Mozart's Divertimento No. 15 choreographed by George Balanchine. Participants were assigned to one of three conditions: Music Only, Dance Only, and Both Music and Dance. They performed four on-line tasks: indicating the occurrence of section ends and new ideas, and judging the amount of tension and emotion expressed. Each of the tasks showed strong similarity across the three conditions, including the Music Only and the Dance Only conditions which contained none of the same Stimulus materials. Analysis of the music and dance uncovered a large variety of elements that define mappings between music and dance. These operate on different hierarchical levels and suggest non-accidental relationships between music and bodily movement. The Both Music and Dance condition could be predicted as a combination of the Music Only and Dance Only conditions, with a stronger contribution of the former. The findings for this excerpt suggest an additive, non-interactive relationship between the music and dance. All three conditions exhibited the same temporal pattern among the tasks. New ideas were introduced at section beginnings when levels of tension and emotion expressed were low. These levels tended to increase within sections, reaching a peak just before section ends. These results suggest that a general Schema of temporal Organization operates in both music and dance. Finally, the three conditions produced very similar judgments of the type of emotional response, supporting the idea that both music and dance can engage similar representations of emotions.