this is one of my many favorite dances, out of many wonderful dance shows available - with my favorite couple, in my favorite dance nowadays: West Coast Swing. Despite their genius-level musicality and ingenuity, and despite the staggering, on-the-spot improvisations, the performance is still very non-bragging, and humane. They are essentially just having fun, and playing around with the audience, with the music and the lyrics - and with each other. And we are just invited to watch, and interact with them via our audicence responses. That way of performing is something I miss in classical music (which I play myself quasi-professionally). I do, however, believe that it was like this when the old masters - Chopin, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, etc - were around. Based on historical accounts, there was most likely a lot of laughter and silliness - blended in with the deep and profound emotions - when they were performing, which most often was in informal settings, for friends and in connection to food and other merriment. I would even go as far as to say that I belive that something isn't really truly deep and profound unless laughter is there. When something is only serious and dressed-up, something important from the depth of the human nature has been lost. What I wouldn't give to have a simple smartphone recording like this one from this dance performance, but from when Chopin or Beethoven or Mozart was improvising, for his friends. Because we have somehow lost that now in classical music. The playfulness. The improvisation. I hope we can get it back. That is one of the reasons why I am myself mixing my own piano playing and solo concerts with dance choreographies. Because in my social dancing, I have access to all of these things that have been lost in classical music: the improvisation, the laughter, the intimate dialogue with the audience. The informality. By mixing my dancing and my piano performing together, I hope to not only explain and illustrate the complex musical structures in the music in a more clear way (a complexity that, interestingly, has been lost in the modern popular music tradition). But I also hope to bring back many of those things that have been lost in the classical tradition. In this way, I want to bring classical music, and dancing, towards something that does not only bring back much of that which has been lost - but to something that goes beyond what any of them have ever been before.
