MUSIC'S INFLUENCE ON COMMERCIAL DANCE!
Now we know a little bit about commercial dance and my development within this module lets talk about what infuences commercial dance. Many things influence commercial dance:
MUSIC HISTORY PIONEERS
however I have just focused on musics influence on commercial dance!
One of the many things that have had an influence on commercial dance is music and its development. It plays a massive part on dance in itself but the development of popular music today has helped it grow and expand greatly overtime. Music has developed because of many factors such as culture, social media and historical events.
From a historical aspect, events such as desegregation had a huge impact on music. During the late 50’s-early 60’s black people and white people were able to come together and some equality was put into place. Therefore, after different races sticking to their own music styles, they were able to interact and inspire each other with their music. Initially, this meant within time they had started mixing their styles of music together and putting in different cultures which has developed into what we hear today. For example, Hip-hop is probably the most dominant music style in the commercial industry , which has come from the African culture. If desegregation didn’t happen jazz and hip-hop wouldn’t have developed how it has which in return wouldn’t have given us the music we use today in commercial dance.
Music has become popular and had the inability to develop as much as it has because of social media. Music can gain popularity a lot easier now because as soon as a new song comes out it becomes viral through social media for us all to see and talk about. This is the same within commercial dance. Dance movements in a lot of music videos have allowed music to gain more popularity, also, allowed dance to gain more popularity. One example of this is the song ‘Thriller by Michael Jackson’; this song has 279,648,723 views on you tube and a distinctive dance that goes with the song. When anyone hears this song the initial thought is to do the dance routine which shows that the movement had an impact on the popularity but in return shows the music also had an impact on the movement’s popularity. More examples of this are in the song ‘whip and nae nae’ and single ladies. These both have movements to go with the song that help gain both the music and dance popularity.
More recently than ever commercial dance is being used in music videos of popular pop songs which have initially made people more aware of the dance form itself. Popular artists have started using dances for the whole of their videos so when you hear the song you have imagery of a dance routine in your head. As many songs have become popular so have the dances to go with it giving more of awareness to non-dancers of the commercial dance and what it entails. A good example of this is ‘Chandelier-by Sia’. Sia is a popular music artist who asked Maddie Ziegler (a young dancer from the show Dance Moms) to dance in her video. The video entailed Maddy dancing for the duration of the whole song and was asked to do a second song as well- ‘elastic heart’. This gave Maddie a lot of recognition and enabled the public to see dance more than they may have because the songs were so popular and were heard on the radio and tv everywhere. This shows that popular music can allow commercial dance to be seen frequently giving it a lot of publicity.
Overall, we can see from this that music and commercial dance help each other to gain popularity and publicity. Popular music is everywhere amongst social media and technology so any dances involved with it will also be shown just as much. Music and dance have initially evolved together which gives us what we see today and a lot of that is commercial dance shown on a popular music video.
