What makes us dance?
Written by FOOTLOOSE Director, Lydia Wagner
When we think of the American Musical, certain pillars come to mind right away: impactful music, exciting spectacle, and show-stopping dancing. This poses a unique problem when a major plot point of the musical you’re directing is that dancing is against the law. So how do you make a musical when you can’t dance? And how can you honor something as iconic as the original movie while still making it feel new? These are the kinds of questions we’ve been asking in the rehearsal room of QCT’s Footloose.
As a music researcher, my approach to direction always stems from a place of deep research that supports the exploration of the major themes in each show I work with. For Footloose, I started with one major question: what makes us dance?
There is no culture across our world that doesn’t have dance and music as a form of artistic or ritualistic expression. Ancient humans used to believe music was born from the stars. Even as late as Aristotle, we find his writings trying to measure the distance between the stars and equate it to the distance between notes on a scale or the distance between strings on instruments. Across cultures we see dance to this music as an offering or celebration of a higher power, with many cultures citing their higher power as having bestowed upon them the gift of music and dance. But how do we know how to use that gift?
Recently, my sister sent me a video of her 10 month old. I had been on the phone with her telling her about my latest musical obsession (Olivia Rodrigo’s “The Cure” if you’re curious) and encouraged her to listen to it as loudly as she could for the best effect. Later that day she sent me a video of my nephew bouncing up and down to the music thumping through his playroom. It took me by such surprise because I thought, “my sister doesn’t dance at all, how does he know how to do that?” So I did some research. It turns out, the first time we hear rhythm is in the womb. It’s an incredibly noisy place filled with the sounds of blood pumping, echos of voices, and the whooshing of all the organs of the body. By the second trimester, ears and the ability to listen to all of this noise start to develop. A recent study on over 120 infants showed that not only does hearing rhythmic music activate the motor cortex, but that babies as young as 4 months instinctively know how to move while hearing rhythm. In fact, listening to music activates almost every part of a baby’s brain. Scientists theorize that this is all developed in the womb and instincts made stronger by seeing the adults around them dance in daily life.
Now you all may be wondering, Lydia, what does this have to do with Footloose? Honestly, I think it has EVERYTHING to do with Footloose! What happens when a town who holds faith in such high regard denies itself expression that is often rooted in a higher power? Even more, they deny themself expression that is integral to our humanity? And how do we see a community come back to that? In our production of Footloose, our choreographer Sjon Jones and I invite our cast to go back to a time when they didn’t know how to express themselves. A time where they were still learning where they fit in the world. We’ve developed a physical language for this show that might not look like traditional Broadway dance. But we hope more than anything that it looks like a community that is trying to grow and trying to learn. In many ways, I think Footloose is a show about returning to oneself and while the act of returning is not always pretty, the act of expression through movement is always powerful.