Seldom do I have extended dialogues on the nature of dance with my friends... Somehow we just end up dancing all the time instead. And yet, I stare at the wall sometimes, contemplating it nonetheless. What follows 3 short thoughts, in no particular order, in which I explore various aspects of this, my favourite hobby.
I. Point, line, surface
It recently became apparent to me (although, sadly, not for the first time), that my stability is lacking. The cause is my foot. It's underdeveloped. I'm working on it. But it has improved significantly in the last year or so. My mental model of a normal person's foot has crystalized into a point -> line -> surface continuation.
Most people who don't actively use their feet, and ideally walk/exercise barefoot (or similar) end up losing the raw capacity of the foot as a surface upon which they stand. Which, originally, it is. The foot is a surface. That might seem obvious, but with long enough lack of use, that surface atrophies into a line, between the heel and the ball of the big toe. A line is less stable than a surface, and the individual loses stability, and capacity in movement. Still more underuse and it atrophies from a line to a point. We don't think of underdeveloped feet as points, but in terms of the amount of stability they provide they akin to walking on stilts... Standing on the foot instead of with or through the foot.
Bringing back the surface is then the slow work of training the foot again.
II. Foreigners in their own bodies
Learning styles aren't a thing*. It was an idea popularized many years ago - that some people learn by seeing, some by hearing, others by thinking about things , etc... - and has been so thorougly proven not to replicate that when teachers use it to promote their methodology I practice my breathing exercises to not let it get to me.
But people do learn at different rates. Vastly different rates. I often ask myself, and I've even asked a coach of mine: Is clumsiness natural? By which I mean, were some neanderthals clumsy? Do the dice of genetics roll so randomly that your natural affinity towards hand-eye coordination gets a failing grade outright? And the reward you get for that is maybe some more smarts, or... some height? I've not gotten a good answer to this. I want to believe clumsiness isn't natural, and that it's a developmental issue, potentially a pinch of trauma detaching a growing child from full proprioceptive mastery of that part of their sensory-motor aparatus. Or, I suppose, just a lack of opportunity for mastery in development? I climbed trees, sprinted down hills, shot bows and arrows, did martial arts, played sports. Is that why I'm not clumsy?
And dance is more complex still, people claim to have two left feet. But if a wild animal attacked your great-great ancestor, would two left feet have been enough of an issue to impact their chance to see another day, and reproduce?
All this to say, some students on dance class are hard to teach. I need their body to move like my body (well, whatever their interpretation is, at least), and the spectrum of success goes from instantly replaying my movements exactly, to sort of floundering in a seemingly unrelated way. What is a dance teacher to do? I can show, tell, show and tell, but the movement has to come from inside, from proprioceptive mastery, feedback loops against the image in the mirror. But what if the inside simply can't produce the movement, if there's something more like proprioceptive confusion, and the image in the mirror doesn't seem at all useful to the exercise at hand.
Can you be a foreigner in your own body? I'm a very cognitive person, so perhaps these individuals are occupying a mostly cognitive reality all the time, and proprioceptive agency was mostly lost after all the bootstrapping was done for whatever age they could tie their shoes and eat their food at.
I don't mean to sound harsh, and I cast no judgement. I'm just curious.
And I provide no answers, these are just my woes.
III. Connection
The word connection occupies a very esoteric and mystical place in partner dancing discourse, and I happen to hold a mostly physicalist view of it. I'm a physicalist about many things, perhaps more than warrant it. I default to physicalist interpretations of phenomena despite holding a nearly metaphysical reverence for dance itself.
One might have the best dance of their life, and report on it saying they had an amazing Connection with the other person. Or the worst dance of their life, and report on how there was no Connection... But I stand there, looking at them, absolutely exploding with questions about what they mean. I get frustrated when people can't explain themselves, there are so many questions and statements that could be made to narrow don't a good/bad connection, but the word is used as a catchall, much like the word Energy is simply the millenial version of Vibes, and can mean anything about anything. There are so many dimensions to a partner dance, skill across several topics (body control, musicality, creativity, moves known, ...), mood in the moment, emotions towards the other person (or lack thereof). All of these can be interrogated to try and understand.
In software engineering, when something seems too complex to understand, it's often a good idea to slow time down immensely and think of what's happening on a much much more granular timescale. It's difficult to understand what a computer is doing from one second to another, but from one nanosecond to another it can be reasoned about. At the scale the magic of a computer reduces down to things going off and on slowly. From there one can slowly build a full image of the computer, with enough patience.
This same thing could be applied to dance, but sadly we would need high-speed cameras and a plethora of other sensors involved. Two people could dance for 30 seconds, and then we could analyze it as a 10 minute slow-motion movie. A single weight transfer could be talked about for minutes. We could see, at 20:1 speed, how weight is transfered, how pressure began to send the follower into a direction, but it came late, and ended up communicating the wrong step. The dancers might see, and understand that it happened because they always expect one step from that position, but they shouldn't. Maybe a bad connection is just a lack of data.
But what if your heart isn't open enough? I don't have a good model for this part of the connection, but I've always thought of it as a kind of symmetrical system. Two individuals start a dance, each is bringing a certain level of emotional (dare I say, even spiritual) openness to the dance. This can manifest in a smile, in playfullness, in deep concentration, in complete submission to the dance, emotion running high, and much more. Does it work if one person is deeply open and the other is resigned, absent? Presumably no, although, I've found that amazing dances come from the least expected pairing sometimes, and expectations are often wrong. I think openness needs to be compatible, wahtever that means, but not the same. Thinking more like 3:7 is compatible somehow in a similar way to 5:5 or 8:8. And often these change as the dance goes on. You start a dance grumpy, and the smile of your partner washes it away clean. Or you enter a dance with the best of moods, and their rough arms hold you so uncomfortably your mood sublimates into anxiety.
My conclusion is that people should be better at knowing themselves, and understanding why dances went the way they went. And of course still open to that home-run out-of-nowhere surprise dance that leaves you speechless and/or in tears.