I’ve also found that dance weekends have a strange ability to increase my skill and intuition/understanding of dance moreso than lessons. I think a big part of learning dance is learning by doing. For me at least a big part is training my proprioception to understand more about the world than it did before. Both leading and following also helps tremendously because a process something like “my mirror neurons have learned how to understand my partner’s experience by being in their shoes in my own experience”.
The most hilarious thing I witness is the different language everyone comes up with to describe the interaction of tone and proprioception. A bit more than half of the instructors I’ve listened to just call it Energy, and talking about directing it from certain places to certain places. Some people call it leading from X or follower voice or a number of other terms. Very few people have a mechanistic explanation of which muscle groups engage to communicate a lead into a turn or a change in angular momentum by a follow, and ultimately it probably wouldn’t really help people because there appears to be an unconscious layer of learning that we all do between muscle activations and intentions.
tl;dr: I find that after thinking about wanting to do a particular thing and then trying it for a while with several different people as both lead and follow I slowly (sometimes suddenly; it was fun learning how to dance Lindy again after the pandemic from following one dance) find that it is both easier to achieve and easier to understand/feel through proprioception. It feels anti-rationalist as a process but performing the process is a pretty rational thing to do.
Disagree that the mechanistic understanding in unhelpful.
As a person who was starting to give privates in zouk, a thing my students really appreciated was the ability to explain things more mechanistically.
Someone who already UNDERSTANDS what you mean by “grounding” or “leading with your projection” or whatnot only needs to be told those things as a reminder.
Someone who is learning how to do those things will just get confused and frustrated if you keep telling them words that just don’t make sense to them yet.
But if you say “Shift your weight slightly forward onto the balls of your feet by leaning forward. Maintain your frame thus pushing slightly towards your follow. Your follow will match this creating a compression. Really think about sending your weight down , driving the ball of your foot into the ground.....” Etc.
There are many things that can be learned just by going and doing. But you’ll quickly hit a wall.
The kinds of things people go to instructors for are the things that they AREN’T just picking up experientially or through expressive language, and any instructor worth anything will be able to:
figure out the mechanics of what needs fixed
Find a way to explain it that will fix the issue. This could be explaining the mechanics, but it might also be creating a visualization that fixes it. Or even overcorrecting them.
I was having difficulty getting followers to do the right kind of downward relaxation of their hands (The main zouk hand connection is neither expansion nor contraction, but a downward relaxation of the follower’s arm). It’s really hard to explain exactly what muscles are doing what, etc especially because it’s dynamic.
A visualization where a hose of heavy running water enters at the top of your head and pours out through the pads of your hands results in a pretty solid frame for lateral. (Picture the water exiting your elbows instead and you’ll notice your shoulder blades will move closer together, which we don’t want).
>A visualization where a hose of heavy running water enters at the top of your head and pours out through the pads of your hands results in a pretty solid frame for lateral.
hm i’ve never heard that one! i’ll try it out, thanks!
I’ve also found that dance weekends have a strange ability to increase my skill and intuition/understanding of dance moreso than lessons. I think a big part of learning dance is learning by doing. For me at least a big part is training my proprioception to understand more about the world than it did before. Both leading and following also helps tremendously because a process something like “my mirror neurons have learned how to understand my partner’s experience by being in their shoes in my own experience”.
The most hilarious thing I witness is the different language everyone comes up with to describe the interaction of tone and proprioception. A bit more than half of the instructors I’ve listened to just call it Energy, and talking about directing it from certain places to certain places. Some people call it leading from X or follower voice or a number of other terms. Very few people have a mechanistic explanation of which muscle groups engage to communicate a lead into a turn or a change in angular momentum by a follow, and ultimately it probably wouldn’t really help people because there appears to be an unconscious layer of learning that we all do between muscle activations and intentions.
tl;dr: I find that after thinking about wanting to do a particular thing and then trying it for a while with several different people as both lead and follow I slowly (sometimes suddenly; it was fun learning how to dance Lindy again after the pandemic from following one dance) find that it is both easier to achieve and easier to understand/feel through proprioception. It feels anti-rationalist as a process but performing the process is a pretty rational thing to do.
Disagree that the mechanistic understanding in unhelpful.
As a person who was starting to give privates in zouk, a thing my students really appreciated was the ability to explain things more mechanistically.
Someone who already UNDERSTANDS what you mean by “grounding” or “leading with your projection” or whatnot only needs to be told those things as a reminder.
Someone who is learning how to do those things will just get confused and frustrated if you keep telling them words that just don’t make sense to them yet.
But if you say “Shift your weight slightly forward onto the balls of your feet by leaning forward. Maintain your frame thus pushing slightly towards your follow. Your follow will match this creating a compression. Really think about sending your weight down , driving the ball of your foot into the ground.....” Etc.
There are many things that can be learned just by going and doing. But you’ll quickly hit a wall.
The kinds of things people go to instructors for are the things that they AREN’T just picking up experientially or through expressive language, and any instructor worth anything will be able to:
figure out the mechanics of what needs fixed
Find a way to explain it that will fix the issue. This could be explaining the mechanics, but it might also be creating a visualization that fixes it. Or even overcorrecting them.
I was having difficulty getting followers to do the right kind of downward relaxation of their hands (The main zouk hand connection is neither expansion nor contraction, but a downward relaxation of the follower’s arm). It’s really hard to explain exactly what muscles are doing what, etc especially because it’s dynamic.
A visualization where a hose of heavy running water enters at the top of your head and pours out through the pads of your hands results in a pretty solid frame for lateral. (Picture the water exiting your elbows instead and you’ll notice your shoulder blades will move closer together, which we don’t want).
>A visualization where a hose of heavy running water enters at the top of your head and pours out through the pads of your hands results in a pretty solid frame for lateral.
hm i’ve never heard that one! i’ll try it out, thanks!
I made it up! It’s to fix some common beginner follower connection problems in lateral, which by now you probably don’t have anyways.