Research: animating dance

The key to animating dance is to let the tempo of the music drive the animation. Determining the tempo simply requires a watch. Count the number of beats in six seconds of music. Multiply this by 10 to get the beats per minute (BPM). When you have this, you can determine how many frames you'll need per beat of music. For example, a common BPM is 120. At 24 frames per second (fps), the frames per beat would be this:
24fps x 60 seconds = 1440 frames/minute
1440fpm/120bpm = 12 frames/beat
Of course, all this math regarding beats per minute is secondary to your character: You first need to figure out how your character will move. Dance steps can be as simple as shaking the character's hips to the beat or as complex as tap dancing.
The one thing about dancing is that it lends itself to cyclical motion. That classic 1970s dance craze The Hustle, for example, is a series of steps that repeat. So is that mid-1990s craze The Macarena. These two examples might be a bit dated and tacky, but they show that many dancers tend to repeat the same moves a number of times. You can animate a single shimmy or a hip shake, for example, repeat it for a few measures, and then switch to other moves. Of course, dancers will never repeat the same move exactly the same way twice, so be sure to use the cycles as a basis for bulding unique motions on each cycle.
Dance moves can be very trendy. What is hip and cool in dance clubs and music videos this year will be totally passe the next. If you're animating for a music video, for example, you might need to duplicate a specific dance move. In this case, it is probably best to discuss the moves with a choreographer or videotape them as a reference.
Dancing is a very primal activity, and most of it starts with the hips, the most primal part of the body. The simplest way to get a character dancing is to keep the feet planted and simply get the hips moving. The easiest way is to create two poses, as shown in Figure 1: one with the hip neutral and the other with the hip out to the right. Animating between these two poses creates the foundation of the basic dance.
One thing about dancing is that it needs to be fluid, not mechanical. Simply moving between two poses will not be very fluid and will give you something that looks more like calisthenics than dancing. As was mentioned before, no dancer can hit the exact same pose twice. These poses are simply a foundation[md]be sure to mix it up by varying the poses and overlapping the motions of the legs and hips.