During the 11 years that Jean Freebury danced for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, she discovered the value of being specific not just with your movement but also with your rhythm. “Merce had metered phrases, and also unmetered phrases where the rhythm would come out of the movement itself,” she says. Sometimes, there were even multiple rhythms going on simultaneously. “The arms and torso were marking out the rhythm one way and the legs were marking out the rhythm in a different way,” she says.
Through tackling these challenges, she learned how to create visual rhythms within her body with the nuance and clarity of a musician. Now, passing on that knowledge is one of her top priorities when training her students at Juilliard, the Merce Cunningham Trust, and the State University of New York’s Purchase College. Her dancers learn new ways of looking at musicality in the body, she says. But she also works to encourage their personal instincts as artists. “I try to get their confidence levels higher about their own ideas about timing,” she says.
So how does she actually accomplish all this in the studio? Dance Teacher recently sat down with Freebury to ask about the strategies and exercises she leverages to deepen her students’ relationships to rhythm. Here are some of the most useful tools she’s found.
Unexpected Counts and Phrases
Dancers are typically trained to move in counts of eight, and sometimes twos, threes, or fours. But Freebury challenges her students with less familiar phrases. “We do a lot of fives and sevens and nines,” she says. She finds this forces them to break out of their usual habits, and brings in different ways of hearing—and feeling—rhythm. Then, even when the dancers return to those eight-count phrases, they have an enhanced sensitivity and more approaches to draw from.
Letting Go of “Musical Scaffolding”
Freebury shares that Cunningham believed that music and dance were independent of each other and usually only came together on the first performance for the first time. Although Cunningham usually used music to accompany the dancers in class, his rehearsals took place in silence, and even in performances, the music often served solely to create an atmosphere, not to guide the dancers’ movements.
“I think, over time, that allowed me to really trust my own ideas about rhythm and phrasing,” Freebury says. “The ability to not have to rely on something else outside of ourselves to feed the rhythm is a really important part of what I teach.”
Sometimes when she has the same students two days in a row, she’ll take an exercise she had set to music on the first day and, on the following day, she’ll remove the “musical scaffolding,” as she puts it, and have the students perform the same phrase in silence or just to a soundscape. This way, she says, they’re able to experience movement without having to follow something that’s directing it. “They’re in the director’s seat.”
This strategy can also be used to identify unhelpful habits. “The tendency is, with fast things, they get a little slower, and with slow things, they get a little faster,” Freebury says. So she trains the dancers to keep those extremes—and the dynamics within the phrase—even when there’s no meter to follow.
In addition to strengthening their musicality, she finds this exercise changes the way they move. “They’re engaged in a different way because they’re making it up in the moment,” she says. “They get less worried about the technique and more involved in sensing the fullness of the movement.”
Remixing the Same Material
Freebury shares that Cunningham once choreographed a solo on her where she had to repeat the same phrase six different times. “And he would say, ‘Make it rhythmically different every time.’ But he didn’t tell me how to do that,” she admits. “It was kind of a game to play.”
Today, she sometimes brings that same idea to class, and will ask students to create different rhythms with the same choreography. This forces them to think creatively about new ways to shape the phrasing, exploring more than just their first impulse.
Music for Class
At both Juilliard and SUNY Purchase, Freebury is lucky enough to work with live accompanists. Rather than dictating exactly what she wants them to play, she treats these musicians as collaborators and mostly gives them freedom to play what they think will work best. (She highlights one percussionist in particular who sometimes sings or recites poetry while she plays.)
When she does use recorded music for class, she’ll typically put on an album by pianist Pat Richter, who recorded the music she played for Cunningham’s classes. “She was so dynamic and spontaneous,” Freebury recalls. She says this album has some of the same tricky timings that she loved tackling in Cunningham’s classes, giving her a chance to pass down the challenge.
