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The Nature of Dance
Seldom do I have extended dialogues on the nature of dance with my friends... Somehow we just end up dancing all the time instead. Nonetheless I stare at the wall sometimes, contemplating it. What follows are 3 short thoughts, in no particular order, in which I explore various aspects of this, my favourite hobby.
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.
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.
The word connection occupies a very esoteric and mystical place in partner dancing discourse, and