What Is Amplitude in Dance?

Why amplitude matters

Half-committed movement — what dancers call "marking" — reads as hesitation to anyone watching. The same step danced at full amplitude is a different step: it communicates confidence and makes the choreography legible from across a room.

Amplitude is also the honest tell of practice habits. Dancers who rehearse small to save their legs discover on camera that small is all their body knows. The camera doesn't add ten pounds of energy; it subtracts twenty percent of your size.

How Danzu scores amplitude

Danzu measures your joints' actual range of motion across the clip — how far your arms, legs, and torso genuinely travel through each move, in a way that doesn't depend on how far you stand from the camera. Robust statistics keep one over-extended frame (or one bad video frame) from defining your range; the score reflects your typical movement size, not your single biggest reach.

Amplitude is not a reward for flailing. Uncontrolled thrashing gets caught by the sharpness and groove axes — Danzu's six axes are designed to be read together, and the coaching tells you which combination is capping you.

How to improve your amplitude

Amplitude is mostly a habit of commitment, plus conditioning:

• Dance full-out in practice. If you only mark, full-out will always feel foreign on camera.
• Exaggerate by 20%: what feels oversized in your body usually reads as "finally big enough" on video.
• Build stamina with rounds: three full-out runs of a 30-second piece, minimal rest.
• Stretch the shape at its endpoint: pause the move at its largest moment and push two centimeters further — that's the version to memorize.

Common amplitude mistakes

Low amplitude scores usually trace back to one of these habits:

• Marking on camera. You rehearse at half size to save your legs, then the camera comes out and half size is all your body knows. Record full-out takes from day one.
• Upper-body-only commitment. Arms sell the move at full size while the feet and hips stay in first gear — amplitude has to be full-body to read.
• Fading in the last eight counts. Stamina runs out exactly where the clip is judged most memorably: at the end.
• Shrinking under uncertainty. The counts you're least sure of are the ones you dance smallest — which highlights them instead of hiding them.

Amplitude vs dynamics

Amplitude measures how big your movement is; dynamics measures whether that size changes with the music. A dancer at maximum size for the whole song can score high on amplitude and low on dynamics — the music asked for contrast and got a constant. Reading the two together tells you whether to train output or interpretation.