A beat is a container — but not all walls are rigid.
In Strict Tempo, it’s like a metal cube:
Each beat has a uniform duration, and you must fit the movement exactly.
In expressive phrasing, that cube becomes a rubber box:
Still bounded, but the walls flex — as long as the entire bar holds together.
You may steal time within a bar, but you must pay it back.
The total must remain intact or the music breaks.
Consider a 3-beat bar:
Total = 2.0 seconds → ✅ The bar is intact.
You’re allocating temporal space like a choreographic budget:
“Elastic time is not lawlessness — it’s jazz with constraints.”
You have 3 units of time per measure — your “currency.”
So the bounding box isn’t discarded — it’s negotiated with.
A great dancer doesn’t just “move on the beat.”
They manage time allocation within and between beats — consciously or intuitively.
Exercise Idea:
Have dancers perform a simple figure (e.g., box step) across 3 bars of Waltz.
They’ll feel the difference — and begin to experience time as a malleable constraint.
“Each beat has physical presence. You inhabit time, not just count it.”
This is the gateway to dancing in music — not just to it.
Isaac Newton - Laws of Motion, which define the relationships between force, mass, and acceleration - the backbone of dance biomechanics.
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis - Principle of Least Action. Maupertuis proposed that nature operates by minimizing action, laying groundwork for modern physics and biomechanics.
Leonhard Euler - Expanded on Maupertuis’ ideas and gave mathematical form to the Principle of Least Action. His work underpins the Euler-Lagrange equations.
Joseph-Louis Lagrange - Developed the Lagrangian Mechanics formalism, which allows us to model motion in terms of energy rather than force. Vital for understanding how dancers conserve or redistribute energy.
William Rowan Hamilton - Introduced Hamiltonian Mechanics, which provides an alternative formulation and links energy conservation with system evolution over time.
Émilie du Châtelet - Translated and extended Newton’s work, particularly his Principia, and was one of the first to clarify that kinetic energy was proportional to the square of velocity (i.e., \(v^2\)). Hugely underrated.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. (And some of them wore wigs).