The Bucket Technique

This was professionally transcribed, but it probably still has some errors. If you catch any, drop me a line at info@bellydancegeek.com. I’d love to hear from you!

When we think about musicality, we always get the advice, “Just follow the music.” But what does that actually mean? Well, what we need to do is, we need to listen and identify cues in the music, and then use them to drive our decisions about what goes into our dance. But what’s a cue? What elements of our dance can that affect, and how do you actually make that decision? The thing is, there’s no single answer to that. Instead of looking for one all encompassing answer, I think it’s more helpful to assemble a kit full of tools that we can use in different situations.

Today, we’re going to talk about one specific tool for responding to one specific type of cue. The movement category or as I call them lately, buckets. A bucket is a tool for translating aesthetic impressions that we get from the music into an appropriate movement selection. What does that mean? Well, when you listen to the music, you get a whole slew of impressions. Some of these might be emotional impressions. Happy, sad, triumphant. Some of these might me more logistical impressions like faster, slower, bigger or smaller. But a lot of them are really impressions about more abstract concepts. For example, soft, sharp, gooey, inward or outward, elegant, suspended, heavy, earthy, vibrating. You could imagine these almost like paints in a paint palette.

When we have those abstract impressions we can use them to help us select movements that are appropriate for that moment in the music. How do we do that? Well, I like to do that by creating buckets. A bucket is a collection of movements that suits a particular aesthetic impression. The first step is to decide which impressions you want to create buckets for. Now, you can use the list that I cited a minute ago as a starting point, and just pick and choose the ones that you like the best. Or, you can create your own list of impressions by listening to a lot of music of different types, genres, speeds, rhythms, and just make your own list. The catch here is that if you do make your own list, make sure that you omit any emotional or logistical ones. We only want the more abstract aesthetic impressions for this technique. Start with a list of five or ten, you can always add more later, and these will be your starting buckets.

The next step is to fill those buckets. For each of the movement categories, or buckets, or impressions that you come with, I’d like you to make a list of all of the movements that you know and like that fit that bucket. Let’s say you’ve chosen gooey. What movements feel appropriate when you get that gooey impression? You can put as many moves as you need into that bucket, but don’t stretch. Only put in moves that seem like an obvious fit for that impression, that you can do easily and that you like. If you don’t like something or if it’s difficult for you to execute, just don’t put it here. You can put as many moves into that bucket as you’d like, but five or seven is plenty, so don’t work too hard at this.

Now, one thing to keep in mind is that a given movement might belong in more than one bucket. For example, hip circles might very obviously go into a soft bucket or a gooey bucket. That’s it. You’ve got your buckets. You’ve filled them with a nice selection of movements. How do you use that to help you make choices in your dance? If you’re creating a choreography, you can sit down and think about it for a given section of the music. What impressions did you get in that moment in the music? Then you can go to your bucket and choose one or more of the movements that are a good embodiment for that aesthetic impression. Easy peasy.

But where this technique really shine is in improvisation. In improve, one of the biggest challenges is choosing movements in the moment. What should I do next? Is a huge open-ended question. You know dozens or maybe even hundreds of different movements, and choosing one out of that huge pool is hard. Usually, what happens is we either end up freaking out and picking one randomly that may not be the most musical selection in that moment, or reaching for the thing that is familiar that we know will work and not using our vocabulary to our fullest, or sometimes we stand there like a deer in the headlights and don’t make a decision at all for a few seconds. None of these is ideal.

But buckets allow you to ask yourself a question that you can answer quickly. What impression am I getting from the music right now? Once you have that question answered, you can just reach into that bucket and pick one of a small number of moves. From that small number it’s very easy to choose something, because the number is limited, but also because everything that you choose from that bucket will work. Everything that you’ve chosen is appropriate musically for that passage. Now, the big thing to remember is that there are no right or wrong answers here. What goes in your soft bucket might be very different from what goes in your best friend’s soft bucket, and that is okay. Approach this from the perspective of your preferences and your ear for the music, and you’ll be just fine.

This isn’t about finding any kind of objective perfection or finding the same answers as anybody else. It’s more about just connecting with how you hear the music and what that means for your dance and your personal style.

I hope you found this helpful. But if you’d like to be walked through it, this is featured on Improvisation Toolkit Volume 1, my instructional DVD. You can get that at: bellydancegeek.com/toolkit-vol1/

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