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These patterns are nested in scales from the moment-to-moment shifts in muscular contraction and release to the rise and fall of dramatic tension in a performed dance.
The authors describe pedagogical practices in the studio that foster engagement with rhythm as lived-experience. Drawing attention to their kinesthetic experience while moving, students are encouraged to modulate levels of exertion embedded in the qualities of movement they are experiencing. As varying levels of exertion are attended to across temporal durations, students notice patterns as they emerge and recur.
This attention to recurring patterns of measured exertion is, the authors claim, the lived-experience of rhythm in dance. Rhythm is a familiar enough word; yet its meaning depends on the user or, more precisely, on how the user uses it. Rhythm means one thing to a farmer and another to a newspaper editor. Nonetheless, each user understands, in a general way, what the other user is referring to when they use the word. Rhythm is not a thing. Nor does it refer to a thing.
Rhythm is a phenomenon like time and space. That makes it difficult to define. In the psychological literature, rhythm has primarily been considered in the domains of music and speech perception where it is generally defined as patterns of relative durations between notes, tones, or other acoustic events Levitin et al. Cummins argues that these definitions inadequately account for the ecological role of rhythm.
