New Year’s Resolutions

It’s that time of year: time to think about what we hope to achieve by this time next year.

I’ve had dance resolutions before, some I’ve met and others I haven’t. They are all personal goals and they are all personal goals related to competition: making finals in my division, placing in the top three, moving out of a division, etc.

When making New Year’s resolutions, it helps to have “SMART” goals: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. I mean, I can say I want to be a world champion in three months, but odds are that’s a foolish resolution that will not be achieved. So we strive to set some goals for ourselves that can be met, that can be measured, and that can be achieved within a year’s time.

Which is why, I suppose, I set my goals based on competition. It’s hard for me to say, “I’ll be better at whips” or “Add more level changes to my dancing.” I suppose I could find an objective way to measure that (tape my dancing and record the number of “good” whips or level changes) but in many ways these goals remain subjective and/or difficult to measure. Competition, however, provides concrete measurements of my progress. Or does it?

Competition itself is subjective, and there’s a danger in judging our own dancing based on such an arena. Competition is another animal altogether, separate from social dancing, with a particular required skill set and its own set of values, all based solely on how you look. Does it provide some benchmarks? Sure. Do we aspire to be better competitors? Perhaps. Should competition be our only goals? I hope not.

Some people set specific goals like, “Be able to do 3 finger spins in a row,” which is specific, measurable, and perhaps realistic. But do these skills alone capture what we hope to be as dancers? I mean, what about feeling good? What about making our partners feel good? What about being better leaders or followers or being better at covering mistakes and making the dance work? What about being nicer, on the floor and off? What about fostering a greater sense of community, helping newcomers and reaching out to people we don’t know?

I offer this challenge: make resolutions for 2010, but keep in mind what kind of dancer you want to be and what kind of dance you want to create.

For me, sure, I want to be more expressive, I want to dance more through my patterns, I want to play with level changes, I’d like to discover some new “wow” moves, and, for goodness’ sake, I want to make finals in California some day. But I also want to dance with someone new (or someone I haven’t danced with in the last month) every time I go out, I want to dance with more newcomers, I want to dance with more people from different cities when I’m at events, and I want to make my partner smile at least once during each and every dance.

What are your dance resolutions for 2010?

Following through with leads

Anyone who’s ever learned to play baseball or softball has been told that when throwing the ball, you need to “follow through” with your arm. You wind up, move your body, move your arm, release the ball, and then follow through. Following through directs the ball where you want it to go and provides a clearer, more effective trajectory.

Leading requires the same follow-through – with your center. Leaders often get the follower going and use their arms to follow through, rather than their bodies. The result is that their bodies are telling the follower one thing while the arms are telling her another – in other words: an arm lead.

The basic mechanics of leading tell us that where you point your center is where the follower will end up. This is simply a function of lead-follow: move your center, which moves your arms, which moves your hand, which moves the follower. Your arms will follow your center, and the follower will, well, follow your arms.

So when you lead a move and you want the follower to go somewhere other than right in front of you, your center needs to move or rotate through the pattern. If it doesn’t move or rotate and she somehow still moves to where you wanted her, either you gave her an arm lead or she went ahead and did something independent of your lead, because your body told her to stay in front of you.

Pointing your center where you want the follower to end up not only gives you a clearer body lead, it also reduces any arm leads, helps you to stay smoother, and ultimately makes it easier to dance at different tempos (because your body is in position at all times).

Leaders, pay attention to what your body/center is telling the follower, specifically about where she should go, and see if your arm is consistent with that. Teachers, how do you get your students to think about their centers – not just when starting a pattern but through the pattern?

The Curse of Knowledge

I recently picked up “Made To Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath. The book explores why and how certain ideas “stick” and others don’t. One of the obstacles they cite to creating simple, sticky messages is the Curse of Knowledge: “Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it…. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.”

I vaguely remember being a non-dancer (it was about a decade ago). I have this faint memory of watching people dancing in a swing class and thinking, “Wow, that’s awesome! I wish I could do that!” but I had no idea what exactly they were doing. I remember too the first time I watched top dancers and could actually identify what they were dancing: a whip variation, a tuck variation, etc. My perspective would never be the same again.

Oftentimes during my dance career I have taken pause – either out of frustration with my own dancing or the scene as a whole – and tried to recall why it is I started doing this crazy dance thing in the first place. I wanted to have fun, to express music with my body, and my objective with each dance was simply to make the follower smile. Ah, those were the days. Of course, with time, my knowledge changed, and with it, my perspective and my objectives. Nothing wrong with that – it’s part of the natural learning curve and evolution of any dancer – but now I have the Curse of Knowledge.

I’ve seen many teachers – usually fantastic dancers who don’t teach regularly but others too – who teach well beyond the level of comprehension of their students: a symptom of the Curse of Knowledge. They are so knowledgeable that they fail to see things from a beginner’s perspective, and they don’t speak in a manner appropriate for beginners. They assume their students have the same knowledge and understanding of the dance that they do and they miss the simple, basic points that the students need to hear and learn most.

We all have the Curse of Knowledge – and the curse cannot be undone: I cannot unlearn something I’ve already learned. Can you remember what it was like to be a beginner? What were your perceptions? What was difficult for you to understand? What do you think are the key ideas and messages teachers should be focusing on for beginners?

Teachers, are you really looking at your lessons from the perspective of your students? Do you get trapped by the Curse of Knowledge? (Don’t we all, sometimes?) How can you reshape your lessons to focus on just one or two simple, key messages in each class?

Arm lead vs. arm use

It’s pretty much instinct for us as humans to move things by using our arms. Enjoying a drink, picking up a book, moving a chair. When it comes to moving followers, leaders tend to go with their instincts and use their arms.

Of course, the difference between moving an inanimate object and moving a follower is that the follower can move herself. In fact, it’s a misconception that the leader moves the follower: leaders, in fact, simply lead. In other words, leaders present a speed and a direction and the follower moves herself in accordance – hopefully.

And hopefully this movement is initiated by the leader’s body (the center, to be precise) without using the arms. The arms are simply a way to communicate a lead from one’s center to the center of the follower, but all movement happens from and by the center. Body leads are smoother, clearer, and cleaner than arm leads, which are often jerky, disproportionate (too strong), and disruptive to the follower’s stability, movement, and timing. However, there are times when the leader must use his arm. Leading a turn, for instance, the leader must lift his arm, which engages the muscles of the arm.

I distinguish this “arm use” – using the arm to shape the follower’s movement – from an “arm lead” – using the arm to initiate the follower’s movement. A follower should be initiated or redirected using the body (body lead), but once she is in motion, that movement may be shaped by using the arms (arm use). That said, an arm “use” that significantly changes the followers momentum then becomes an arm “lead.” So an arm use should not conflict with the original body lead at the start of the pattern, and any changes in momentum should be made by the leader’s center.

The idea here is to make sure that leaders use body leads, not arm leads, and that any arm use is used simply to shape the follower’s movement, not change it. Changes of momentum should be done with the body and the body alone.

Annie Get Your Gun

I’m pretty sure no one ever came home one day to say, “Wow! I had a great day! I was carjacked!” And I doubt anyone ever said, “That flight was fantastic! We were hijacked!” You know why? Because hijacking is bad.

Hijacking is stealing by stopping and coercing someone. If this doesn’t sound very nice, it’s because it isn’t. Whether it’s hijacking a car at gunpoint, hijacking a plane with the threat of explosives, or hijacking a lead during a dance. Doesn’t matter. Not nice.

In terms of dancing, “hijacking” is when the follower either ignores a lead or else completely changes it from its original intention. It isn’t nice. It’s telling the leader, “Sorry, I don’t care what you want to talk about, because we’re going to talk about this.” If someone were to say, “Hi, how was your day?” it would be rude to ignore the question and say, “I’m going to eat some chocolate.”

A question was posed recently to a dear friend of mine, Maria Blackwell, a fantastic dancer and teacher who gives more of herself to her dance community in St. Louis than anyone else I’ve ever seen. Her student asked if a follower went to play, wasn’t she taking over the lead? Maria smartly answered that there are rude and polite ways of interjecting – and sometimes it’s a fine line which is which.

I could write a whole treatise here on partner dynamics, but suffice it to say that the way to avoid hijacking is to acknowledge the lead and follow it through, even if you give it your own spin. Taking the lead and playing with it is expressive following. Ignoring the lead and doing what you want – even if the music “calls for it” – is hijacking. And that’s just rude.