teaching

The paradigm of leading and following

Lately I’ve been working with my students on dancing in closed position to work on improving their lead/follow, body movement, and musicality. Despite the fact that I had the partners dancing nearly body-to-body, center-to-center, nevertheless, without fail, many if not most of the leaders would try to use their arms to move the follower, and many of the followers would try to guess where the leader was going.

In my view, this behavior is symptomatic of the general paradigm by which we often dance: the leader moves the follower, and the follower goes where the leader wants her to go.

Think about that for a moment.

The leader moves the follower. He is responsible for moving her from one place to another. Not the follower herself, but the leader does the moving. And the follower goes where the leader wants her to go. Where he wants her to go. The priority is on what the leader wants. And so the leader spends his time focused on moving the follower, and the follower spends her time focused on what the leader wants. And this was playing out in class, where the students were dancing in closed position.

The challenge is to shift our thinking about the role of the partners and the dynamic between them. Leaders should be focused on moving not their partners but their own bodies, and letting the follower respond (aka “body lead”). And followers shouldn’t be trying to read his mind but rather focus on moving themselves in response to what they feel from the leader (aka “following”).

This is a subtle distinction, but watch how many people have a hard time doing it. Because after months or even years of living with the current paradigm, we so easily slip into what we already know and do. The new paradigm isn’t impossible or even too difficult. It just takes commitment, the right training, and lots of mindful effort. But man, think of how great partner dancing could be if we did change the paradigm…

Pay attention to the dynamic you set up in your own dancing, and watch others when you get the chance. Which paradigm are you dancing and seeing? What happens when you try dancing the new one? Teachers, how is your teaching – both the content and the manner – shaping your students’ understanding of the role of the partners and the dynamic between them?

Where’s your head at?

As many of you know, I switched my teaching awhile ago from patterns to concepts around techniques, partnership, and musical interpretation. But as I work on these other things with students, I realized that outside of class and on the social dance floor, students are used to grounding their dance in patterns, and their mindset is very different under these circumstances.

The way we teach the dance orients students to think of executing the minutiae of patterns, and in doing so, they lose the forest for the trees. We forget about the fundamentals of lead and follow, the mechanics of the dance, musical interpretation, and even body mechanics and partnership. The challenge then is to be able to execute movements while maintaining (if not elevating) your quality of movement, and that means not letting yourself get lost in the details.

This month I taught whip variations of increasing complexity, with three goals in mind: (1) improve technique related to whips; (2) improve understanding of lead/follow and the mechanics of WCS; and (3) train students to maintain the first two while executing patterns through proper mindset.

The challenge wasn’t easy, and I confess that not all of my experimentation worked, especially as we moved away from the basic whip to new variations. I noticed that how I taught – where I put emphasis and what words I used – affected the students, but also many of them have been trained as pattern dancers and are learning to form new mindsets and behaviors. Where they were most successful was when I was able to pull them up out of the details to the bigger and more universal concepts of the mechanics of the slot and lead/follow. But then, the trick is to keep them at that level over time…

How often do you get lost in the details of patterns? How do you see your dance as movements and not moves? Where does your mind gravitate while dancing and how does it affect your quality movement? Teachers, how do you instruct your students so they stay focused on concepts and techniques without succumbing to the details and repetition of patterns?

Mind Over Matter: Attitude and mindset

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts called “Mind Over Matter” that explore the importance and relevance of the psychological aspects of dancing.

In the last posts in this series, I discussed the importance of self-awareness for learning and improving. Having knowledge of your body, how it moves, and the corresponding effects of that movement is what helps us work towards our dance goals.

At the same time, it is important to maintain the right mindset when assessing or analyzing our own movements. When working with students, or sometimes even just dancing with them, I noticed they’ll suddenly make a face of disapproval. When I ask what the matter is, I get a response along the lines of, “Oh, I messed up” or “I did that wrong.” My partner is chastising herself for doing something other than what she wanted or meant to do.

The problem with this self-reprimanding approach is that it infringes upon our own progress. Our attitude and state of mind are directly associated with our ability to learn. This has been examined with respect to students in other countries who are studying English. One study of students in northern Malaysia found that attitude was significantly correlated with performance in English classes (motivation, however, was not a significant factor in performance). In fact, the more positive their attitude, the better their grades. A similar study also found that attitude was positively correlated with learning English, and even revealed that anxiety significantly and negatively affects learning. So not only does a positive attitude help, but stress and anxiety hinder one’s learning.

Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, studies people’s self-conceptions (mindsets) and how they affect their behavior, their achievement, and their success. In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she describes two different mindsets: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. In the former, people believe that their traits and characteristics are fixed, and failures and incompetence are reflections of their deficiencies. In the growth mindset, however, people believe they can develop their traits through passion, education, and persistence, and they see failures as opportunities to learn and grow. They also pursue learning for its own sake, rather than seeking achievement to prove their skill and worth.

When we chastise ourselves for mistakes, we are adopting a negative attitude, and when we get negative about improving, we run the risk of reinforcing a fixed mindset – especially if we focus on our ingrained habits.

The trick is to adopt the growth mindset. To do this, we should first observe our movements objectively, without judgment. Recognize what you did as if it were matter of fact, rather than classifying it as good or bad, right or wrong. Then accept that whatever you observed can be done differently the next time – that the way you’ve done it in the past is not reflective of who you are or what you are capable of. After all, the truth is that while we may not learn as quickly as we would like, we can in fact learn and improve, with the right combination of motivation, instruction, and perseverance – and mindset.

A negative attitude and a fixed mindset can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophesy, whereas a positive attitude and a growth mindset can accelerate our learning. So stay positive, remember that you have the capacity to grow and improve, and enjoy the process of learning.

When you observe your own dancing, are you positive, negative, or objective? What do you do to stay positive about your progress and adopt a better mindset? Teachers, how do you talk to your students in a way that reinforces a growth mindset?

Mind Over Matter: Staying focused

This is the third in a series of blog posts called “Mind Over Matter” that explore the importance and relevance of the psychological aspects of dancing.

The previous post in this series looked at the danger of focusing on what not to do. Another common problem with the way we’re taught is that we’re often given too many things to focus on.

Focus is a critical skill needed for advancing our dancing. It’s how we train our bodies to develop new habits that replace the old ones. By focusing on continually and consistently doing something new, we learn to retrain our bodies, building muscle memory and a higher skill level that makes the new behavior become a habit – something we don’t need to focus on any longer. However, without focusing on new behaviors, we’re bound to continue repeating our old ones.

At the same time, the human brain can only focus on one thing at a time, and multitasking has negative effects on our ability to pay attention, control memories, and switch between tasks. So how can we make progress on any one thing when we’re trying to work on several at once? How do we focus when there are half a dozen priorities?

It’s hard enough to focus at all, given all the distractions while we’re dancing. It’s too easy to just revert to our usual dancing and not focus on anything. So imagine the challenge when we’re given a laundry list of things to work on.

Learning to focus is important for progress, as is knowing what to focus on. Getting to the root cause of our problems and finding the right solution is sometimes difficult but makes learning and improving so much easier. And a good solution is something that addresses root causes while being easy for the mind to focus on. After all, if we can’t focus on it, then we can’t do it consistently enough to make it into a habit.

How do you stay focused on building new skills? How does staying focused affect your dancing? How do you prioritize what you work on? And teachers, how much do you consider your students’ ability to focus when giving feedback or things for them to work on?

Detachable feet

Last week I wrote about how we become pattern dancers and the effects that has on our relationship to our partner and to the music. Just as we tend to get locked into patterns, we also get locked into specific rhythm patterns with our feet.

A rhythm pattern is a specific sequence of doubles and triples that forms the foundation for patterns. For example, the rhythm pattern for a six-count pattern is double-triple-triple. These rhythms are fundamental to our dance and are closely tied to the execution of patterns.

However, we spend so much time working on rhythm patterns that we can have difficulty breaking out of them. When we attempt syncopations or a change of rhythm with our feet it can be disruptive to our movement and to our partnership. Our bodies become highly dependent on our feet, sometimes to the point that we are moving from our feet instead of our centers. This isn’t entirely surprising, given the strong emphasis on when and where to put your feet in dance classes. After all, how we talk about the dance influences where we focus our dancing.

Learning to decouple footwork from movement frees us up to be musical with our feet without interrupting the flow of the dance. It allows us to take advantage of our feet as instruments of expression, particularly when the partnership demands attention of our bodies and a continuity of movement. Besides, being able to separate our footwork from our movement is indicative of a higher level of dancing, where the center drives the body and we don’t need to be mentally focused on our feet.

Do you find that you have to focus on your feet when breaking out of a standard rhythm pattern? Are you able to let your feet play without disrupting your movement or the partnership? What have you learned about footwork and rhythms that has made things easier or more difficult for you? Teachers, how do you talk about footwork in your classes and how do you help your students get comfortable with their footwork?