House, hip-hop or disco? Four choreographers on the best music to dance to

Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance With Somebody was the most-requested track from UK DJs last year, according to the DJ Intelligence platform — and four leading choreographers now have theories about why some music simply forces bodies to move.

'I don't know what it is about house music that makes me move, but I just can't help it,' says Faye Stoeser, a performer and choreographer. 'And I don't care what I look like. I just go for it.'

Dannielle 'Rhimes' Lecointe points to hip-hop. 'If a Missy [Elliott] track comes on, that's me, I'm in the zone,' she says. 'With hip-hop it's something deep within the gut that makes you want to move. It has so many rhythms to it – a heartbeat, a pulse, a ricochet – that you feel in so many different places of your body.'

Which tracks actually fill floors?

The numbers give a snapshot of popular taste. DJ Intelligence found Abba's Dancing Queen came second in UK requests, with Mr Brightside by the Killers third. In the US, Billboard's top wedding song is Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars. A 2013 Mixmag poll named Daft Punk's One More Time the greatest dance track of all time, while Radio 2 listeners voted Michael Jackson's Billie Jean to the top in 2008.

What about dance on stage?

Here the picture changes. For professionals, plenty of dance isn't driven by music at all. Back in the 1940s, the US choreographer Merce Cunningham began disconnecting dance from music in his collaborations with composer John Cage, rehearsing his dancers in silence. Some choreographers still use music in the studio that is completely different from what their performers hear on stage.

Dance focused on musical connection did go out of fashion for a while. But as Stoeser and Lecointe's testimony shows, the tide is turning: a batch of upcoming shows puts music back at the absolute centre of the work, with house and hip-hop leading the charge.