How Tracie Stanfield Teaches Dancers to Be Partners With the Music

Tracie Stanfield doesn’t want students to just dance to music. She wants them to partner with it. “It should be a duet,” says the contemporary lyrical and contemporary jazz teacher. “I want it to look like they inspire the music—not that they’re dancing to the lyrics.” 

Dancers of all backgrounds take Stanfield’s fusion classes at Steps on Broadway and Broadway Dance Center in New York City. So they come with a range of habits that often dictate their musicality. One of the biggest things she focuses on is helping students become more intentional about how their movement sits within the music—when they start and when they land a step in relation to the counts. She recently spoke to Dance Teacher about a few of the strategies she uses to help dancers become more in control of their approach rather than letting the music control them. 

Picking Songs With Enough Depth to Challenge Students

Because Stanfield mainly teaches fusion classes, her students get an opportunity to work on various approaches to musicality. “Lyrical movement stereotypically flows through the counts, while contemporary and jazz land on the count,” she explains. “So I’m always trying to find music that is challenging them to figure out when to flow through and when to sit right on top of it.” 

That can look like anything from singer-songwriter tracks to show tunes. But no matter the genre, she always plays music that has enough depth to give the dancers some complexity to work with. “I’m looking for a heaviness and a lightness—there’s always got to be dimension to the music,” she says, adding that she won’t use songs that she finds to be too pretty or “wispy,” as she puts it. 

Asking Students to Dance “Against” the Music

Stanfield admits that she often doesn’t listen to lyrics (except to make sure there’s no profanity). However, sometimes she’ll pull out a popular song that has a strong story to it in order to challenge her dancers to create a totally different vibe. 

“I recently gave them ‘I Put a Spell on You,’ by Annie Lennox,” she says. “The temptation was to make it jazzy or showy or try to ‘sell it.’ But I was asking the dancers to just be strong and let the audience come to them as opposed to needing to be liked.” Stanfield finds this tactic stretches dancers as artists—they learn how to create the story they want to tell, no matter what the music is saying.      

Using Clapping Exercises to Hear Each Student’s Musicality       

When a class is small enough, Stanfield—who has a background in rhythm tap—will sometimes have everyone stand in a circle and clap to the beat, then do double time, then half time. “We go around in a circle—I’ll clap twice, you clap twice,” she says. “I see who hears right on top of the music, who hears a little slow, who hears a little fast.” Sometimes even professional dancers in the room will have epiphanies about their musical ear, she says. 

Another clapping exercise Stanfield likes is to give everyone in the circle four counts to clap any way they want to the music. Some dancers just clap out four even counts, whereas others will bring in some syncopation or play with silences. Hearing their individual approaches helps inform Stanfield about how she can best guide them to deepen their musicality. 

Songs She Loves to Play in Class

Here are 10 songs that are some of Stanfield’s top picks these days, plus details on how she incorporates a few of her favorites: 

“Catwalk,” by Emmit Fenn

“We do a center barre in my class, and it can get pretty difficult. The harder the combination, the more ridiculous the song I choose. You can’t hate yourself if you’re dancing to this! It’s just a techno song. There’s not a lot of lyrics, but there’s a really strong beat. And we do rond de jambes and battements to it. It just creates a lightness in the room, like they’re kind of giving over to the beat as opposed to hating their life. Because I want the dancers, if they’re able, to just release, allow the movement to come out of them while they’re just letting the music hold them and support them in the warm-up.”

“Don’t Stop Believin’,” by Teddy Swims

“Right now, my pliés are ‘Don’t Stop Believin’.’ I tried to change the music, but the dancers were like ‘No, we really love that!’—because it’s a challenging plié phrase, but they’re singing. I just love that. We’re working at a high level, but when they know the song, they can relax into it.”

“Cell Block Tango,” from Chicago

“I recently did a combo to ‘Cell Block Tango’ and did it really contemporary—very laid-back, kind of bored, not letting the story wash over the dancers. They came in with preconceived notions of ‘I’m going to do a fan kick to this, sit in a chair backwards and straddle it.’ And instead we did floor work. We played with what the music was saying versus how we wanted to tell the story.” 

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