I’m in an a cappella group at Yale, so I know my snaps. I am no stranger to the snap. In fact, if I do say so myself, I was the designated snapper in one concert. But singing to snaps is one thing. Dancing for three hours to snaps is quite another.

Warming up to snaps was alarming at first; then it became repetitive and boring. I always would rely on the music during warm-up to raise my energy and enthusiasm for the class. It also helped me get in the dancing mindset, away from the chaos of school life. Thus, my first class was difficult in many facets. I didn’t know the movement style. I had just come back from break and was getting into the rhythm of school. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. There was no music.

After two classes, I began to love it, although I didn’t realize it. I wanted to repeat exercises and I’d get “snaps” stuck in my head (up-up-DOWN up-up-DOWN up-up-DOWN). I’d look in the mirror and see, to my surprise, that the clock reported an hour and a half of warmups had flown by in a flash.

Then one Saturday a pianist came.

Don’t get me wrong: this guy was great. I walked in and he was playing ridiculously complicated arpeggios. He improvised haunting, abstract harmonies to Ms. Goggans’ snaps and counts at the drop of a hat. He paid attention to the quality of our movement and mimicked it with his playing. He was, by all means, fantastic.

The moment I realized that I felt “off” dancing to music was the moment I realized I was gettin’ the hang of this stuff. The music threw me off an infinitestimal bit, and I remembered problems I had always ignored with dancing to music, like the little adjustment you made to fit your movement to the tempo of the music, or the moment of panic when you think you’re off a count, or the little lurches dancers do when they’re not sure when to start dancing. They threw me off.

I think that the core problem here is, again, the fact that music is an intermediary between how two dancers count, or how the movement feels on a dancer’s body. It obviously has its redeeming qualities. It was great to have music. The drastic change made me focus on my own dancing and the bad habits I had fallen into. It also provided a welcome deviation from the ordinary. I breathed a sigh of relief, though, to go back to the swishing of feet and of fabric.