Clear empirical distinctions can be drawn between joint improvisation and choreography in dance by exploring the rhythmical coordination of dancers and audience members in a partner dance performance. Novice dancers typically learn footwork patterns or ’basics’ that help them move in time to music together. Experts’ familiarity with basics, as well as conventional variations and set­piece moves form a set of compositional structures that can be linked together to fit complimentary rhythmical patterns in music on the fly. In a ’social dance’ performance such as the Lindy hop, (an African American vernacular jazz dance from which the data for this study is drawn), dancers link together basics with set­piece moves along with moments of joint improvisation. These improvised movements are literally extemporaneous ­ they move out of the temporal regularities of mutually learned patterns and rely on other kinds of interactional resources and methods to achieve coordination. This paper analyses rhythmical coordination between dancers and audience members clapping along to a Lindy hop performance in a naturalistic setting using data drawn from a Youtube video. This empirical starting point enables a tractable analysis of the haptic, visual, and semantic structures and processes used for coordinating extemporaneous dance movements. Audience members’ rhythmical responses to these processes also provides insight into long­standing problems of measurement and meaning in empirical aesthetics. Music and dance psychology tend to emphasise psychophysical measures and post­hoc report as proxies for aesthetic response. This paper proposes new ways to use the observable patterns of rhythmical coordination to explore joint improvisation as part of an interactional sense­making practice
Mot(s) clés libre(s) : interaction linguistique, improvisation