Every one can sing a song but not every can play a song; same idea apply to dancers- dancers need to know music but they do not need to be musicians. But why is such knowledge included in the syllabus?
Knowing the music enable you to write a dance best the music. In some cases, we dance to drum beats only, but most of the time, we dance to music. We may not be able to write a dance since not all dancers are choreographers, but we need to interpret the music through our dancing. If we know nothing about the music, it is impossible to express it.
Moreover, a good dance needs to go with the music, so the dance also goes with the phrases, which is built by the beats and bars. A phrase is like a paragraph in an article! a bar is like a sentence in a part; a beat is like an individual word in a sentence. How we organise the words and the sentences is the rhythm. A rhythmic change happens when the paragraph ends and then the following paragraph starts as another idea elaborates.
Imagine a dance only consists a step-tap, and one keeps dancing the step-tap until the end of song regardless how the musical phrases develops. That is not a successful dance, that would only be a collection of steps.
Simply put, even dancers do not necessarily need to be as knowledgeable as a pianist of a composer, they need to have general musical knowledge, so that they can produce a dance that can touch the audience.
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