I did technical work for Conn's International Dance Festival for a summer, did some conducting work for a collaborative project with student composers and choreographers when I was in grad school, played in ballet orchestras (although that didn't give me much of a chance to study the choreography)...almost all of my experience with choreography and music has been hands-on rather than as an audience member. I have seen some of the more landmark dance/music collaborations, mostly on recording--Appalachian Spring, some of the Cage/Cunningham projects, etc.

In that time, my experience has been that the choreographers I've worked with sometimes seem to exhibit an understanding of something as vague as the "feel" of the music. Sometimes, they don't appear to get that far. A lot of the choreography I've seen looks self-indulgent, as if it's a dance piece that just happens to have this piece of music occurring simultaneously. If that's intentional, great--I can get behind that--but I get the sense that generally speaking, choreographers don't go into a piece with that in mind.

There have been exceptions to that, obviously, but in a lot of cases, if the choreographer is designing "musically," I certainly haven't been able to discern how they're going about it.