How to Count Music While Learning a Short Dance Combination

Choose a piece of music that has a clear beat and, setting the choreography aside for now, begin counting out loud on that beat. Start from one and count up to eight, repeating from one again each time you get to eight. Continue like this until the counting starts to feel more natural. This is important in order to find a starting place before adding all the other information.

Now return to the combination, working through as before to find the count for specific parts. Confusion with choreography often is an issue not of not knowing the steps, but rather of not having the information needed to place those steps in relation to the music. A count can be used to create a timeline for when things happen: I move my weight to my left foot on the one, start to prepare for a turn on the three, come back from that turn and reach my arm forward on the five… As you begin to develop a basic understanding of when these things happen in relation to one another, you can take small chunks of the combination, just two or three moves at a time, and practice while saying the counts out loud, reducing your movement size if necessary:

I come down low during the one, two, three, four, count (not simply get low during that count and wait!), my other foot is in position to lead my direction change by the time I land on the four, the movement continues on the five as I prepare my next step on the six…

At this stage, it is okay to leave other body parts out of it, focusing on timing of the feet while keeping the upper body still. Later, when you have the basic counts for where your feet are and when they will change, you can add in the timing of upper body movements. You might find that your upper body actions follow a different count from your steps, and may even move at a different tempo. Remember that in contemporary dance much of the movement happens between counts, and that you don’t need to finish one movement and start another at the same time: You might start a turn on the five, continue turning on the six and finish it on the seven.

After establishing a sense of the count, you can start to count less and count more in your heads, focusing less on all the numbers and more on simply maintaining the beat and counting as needed. You can always reduce your speed or size of movement if it becomes difficult to maintain the rhythm while coordinating all the components of the dance, and then work back up again.

As your counting becomes more internal, the only specific counts you consciously keep track of might be the start of a turn or other direction change, or where a longer musical phrase begins. If you make a mistake, return to the last solid count that you remember and try again from there, rather than start from the beginning each time.

Musicality has much to do with understanding where and how long you will be doing things within the rhythm, so think about the count or counts you begin moving on, the count you arrive on, and counts you need to get yourself ready for the next movement. That’s your map.