dance is related math!

When most people think of dance, they think of the movement quality of a dancer. Little to none of them actually consider the math and persion it takes to correctly execute the movement and achieve the "perfect" lines. Dancers not only study movement of the body, but also staging and musicality. To make a dance a complete work of art, you must include all of the above, or else the work will not be pleasing to the audiences' eye.

Lines of the body are essential to all forms of dance. Hip hop, jazz, contemporary, and classical ballet all incorporate certain body placement that define the different styles of dance. For example: in Ballet, the lines of the body are usually elongated and stretched, possessing a strong but graceful movement quality. While modern day contemporary mostly consists of broken jagged lines in comparison to more classical movement. Most lines dancers learn to create are the angles of 45, 90, and 180 degrees. Geometric shapes such as circles are also used in a  dancers work to frame the body.

 contemporary 

ballet

Dance is also directly tied to music. In dance, the music is generally counted in sets of eights, which differs slightly in how most musicians would count it because instrumentalists would most likely count in bars of four counts. However Eight counts is standard for most music, dancers also deal with music in 3/4 time along with other time measures. This results the standard counts of 1-8 to convert into counting in 3s, 6s, 10s, and 12s. Not only does the time measure matter to a dancer, but rhythm is a huge part of a dancers job. Syncopation is key is making an interesting piece. Not only does a dancer just dance on the down beats (the numbers), they also consider the 1/8 Th. and 1/16th notes creating more opportunity for movement structure. Fractions are a huge part of musicality. 

The formation a choreographer puts the dancer in is also a direct connection to math. In many cases choreographers place there dancers in symmetrical formations in a work for cleanliness of the steps. Basically what that means is that the teacher will set the dancers to dance a phrase, or part of the routine, in a specific place where as you could draw a line down the center of the dancers' formation and it would be identical on each side. It is the same as finding the symmetry line on a shape. If the choreographer wants to give a piece a more depth and interesting look and feeling to the work, they will often use a non-symetrical formation. Kind of like a irregular polygon, because if you were to draw a line down the middle of a irregular polygon the shape would be uneven on each side.

 symmetrical formation 

non-symetrical formation 

As dancers, we also tend to move in arches and on several different planes in space. This movement directly relates to parabolas and different and changing slopes of the body.

CLICK HERE for a great website of information on how teachers directly use mathematics and dance together.