The Best $2 I Ever Spent On My Dance Education

It was back when I first started teaching. One Saturday I was out with my girlfriend at the time and we were fishing through the used books in the basement of the local university book store. (Yup, that’s right, that’s the geeky kind of casual dates I take girls on. And I’m single, imagine that! :) ) So anyway my girlfriend hands me a book she finds – something about “dance” and “education” and some really bland cover. I thought “looks pretty boring, but sure, I’ll get it, it’s only $2.” And then it sat on my bookshelf for a few months.

So one day I finish some book and wonder “what should I read next? maybe I’ll grab something from what I have already instead of buying something new at the bookstore.” (Amazon wasn’t around yet.) So I pick out this book again -- “Modern Educational Dance” by Valerie Preston-Dunlop and I start reading it.

Understand this is a time just into when I started teaching, when I really start to question “how do you train really good dancers? not just any dancers, but really great ones, for the most part looking around it’s hit or miss – random if the teacher can even teach – random if the student can learn.” And being the scientific mind that I am, thinking “there’s got to be a better way, there has to be a more successful and more organized way.”

So I get into this book, and it’s awesome. It for the most part is an English translation of the work in German of Rudolf Laban plus some extra writing by Valerie Preston-Dunlop on her analysis of it. The main work is a series of 16 lessons grouped into the themes of body, space, dynamics, and social relationships. Laban breaks down a very systematic way of looking at all movement in all it’s variations and even more importantly HOW TO TEACH IT. It’s genius.

I of course got busy working on improving my dancing. It’s important to DO and not just KNOW. You need to practice and experiment to really learn, so every weekend I would go out clubbing. But while other people where busy getting drunk or hitting on girls, I was out on the floor doing the exercises from the book. Experimenting with curved lines versus straight lines. Playing with heavy vs light dynamics or flexible vs direct or sudden vs sustained. Yup, dance geek, that’s me.

At the time I really didn’t realize that I should fit that all into my ballroom and latin dancing. Sadly there are a lot of dance teachers out there, stuck on very minor details that mean very little. Not to mention a very narrow minded focus that the only place to learn latin is from a latin teacher and the only place to learn standard is from a standard teacher – mostly really a sales tactic, good dancing is good dancing.

So one day I was taking a lesson from Jose Decamps and he starts explaining something to me. “So, like flexible and direct?” I say. And emphatically he says “YES!”. So we talk more about modern and Laban and Jose’s like, “why don’t you apply what you know about modern to your ballroom?” That was a big turning point for me.

Now you see it all the time. Michael Malitowski and Joanna Leunis have done several Blackpool lectures about Laban in Latin. Ruud Vermey has a whole chapter on it in his book “Latin: thinking sensing and doing”. You can find it in technique videos.

It’s well worth your time to learn what’s there and practice it. Take for example practicing your routines. For one month each morning do your dance routines in each of your dances and do them each once in all the eight basic Laban dynamics (wringing; pressing; floating; gliding; slashing; thrusting; dabbing; and flicking). And then do a round where you just mix it all up and have fun. I can guarantee if you do that for a month your dancing will be tons better. You’ll be able to learn movement better; you’ll move better yourself; probably improve your core strength a bit; you’ll be able to see other people’s style and be able to learn and replicate it sooner.

Oh… and the reason the book was only $2 – it was a misprint – there are about 50 pages printed twice in the book.

Further Reading…

A HANDBOOK FOR MODERN EDUCATIONAL DANCE

Latin - Thinking Sensing and Doing in Latin American Dancing

Laban for All

Attitude

Attitude Attitude Attitude. Probably the most important thing to your dancing (ok, life) is your attitude. I’m going to talk about one specific area of that. What is your answer to the question, are people fundamentally changeable or are people fundamentally fixed?

In dancing this comes up as “you needed to have started when you were kid” or “natural talent” or “he/she is a natural”. So where do you stand, do you think you needed to start young, or could you start at any age? Is it all learnable?

I believe everything is learnable. There is great change that you can make if you have the right knowledge and dedicate the time. You need to have both. There are plenty of students that I’ve seen spend hours and hours and hours practicing the wrong thing. I feel even I was stuck in a rut like that for a few years. I also see that at the gym – plenty of people working out but not in a way that will get them any progress. The opposite it also possible – the student that can quote twenty things the last coach they had told them, but hasn’t practiced a single one.

I think it’s easy to fall back into the idea that you need to be “gifted”. In our society we have an epidemic of parents teaching their kids that they are all “special”. Kind of grown out of a misconception of studies in the 70’s that found there was a correlation between students that got good grades and confidence. Out of that correlation somehow we got to, “oh we need to worry about our kids confidence and that will improve their grades!” Well, guess what, it doesn’t work. Just cause A correlates with B doesn’t mean A causes B (in Latin, the logic fallacy: cum hoc ergo propter hoc – with this therefore follows this). But perhaps instead some other thing C (like HARD WORK) causes both A (confidence) and B (good grades).

The book Mindset:The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck is just about this topic. She describes Fixed Mindset as those people who believe you have natural or born talent and Growth Mindset as those people who believe change is possible and things are more a matter of hard work and effort.

It’s possible to have a fixed mindset in one area (say physical ability) and an growth mindset in another area (math). It’s possible to believe only a certain amount is changeable or everything or nothing.

I used to be 6ft tall and 135 pounds (scrawny!), but I studied. I read all about weight lifting and how to do it, what to do, what is most effective for different types of results. And then I just followed the advice. It was easy, I gained 40 pounds of muscle in less than a year! (Ok, there was a tough part – it was the eating – I had to stuff myself till I felt like was going to burst for a lot of meals).

And yet after that there were still some body things that I still felt weren’t changeable. Not until I was dating a girl and I started training her. Tons of body changes, and all within a few months. Broader wider shoulders, the shoulders more relaxed onto the back, straighter, cleaner looking legs (oh yeah bow leggedness and knocked-knees are pretty fixable in most people), better posture, big and little toes that don’t curve inward but have a nice straight alignment out from the heel.

But after seeing that and many other radical body transformations since then. I am a total believer that great change is possible.

I used to not think about bringing this up with students. That perhaps I should just stick to the physical, the facts, the steps. But now I know you have to bring it up, and bring it up early. It’s important. As one book on coaching I read put it: To make radical changes you must ask deeper and deeper questions. It can make a huge difference between a student that is easy to teach and one that is difficult to teach.

Books to Read

Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Rush Rush Rush

It’s easy to see a lot of dancers just rushing from one thing to the next. Running around one pose or trick to the next as if it were a race. It cheapens the dance. Isn’t it wonderfully juicy to see people slow down, take some time, be in the moment. Even the most basic of step can take on magical powers. To do that it takes focus, courage, strength, and visualization.

Focus

It is said that our society over values the narrow objective focus. Narrow in that we are trained to focus on one thing, objective in that we are trained to focus detached and judging. The opposite is a diffuse immersed focus. Changing your focus to me more diffuse, being aware of all of your surroundings when you dance – not just you or your partner, but the audience, the room itself, the subtleties of the music. And integrating yourself with your observation and surroundings.

Take a round to practice your dancing with diffuse immersed focus.

Courage

Many of your fellow dancers will be rushing through their choreography. It will be distracting. It will take focus and courage to maintain your course, to do what is right for yourself in your own moment.

Strength

Strength in holding on to the moment. To resist the tension that surrounds us to do something. To work against it, to use it to our advantage. In acting, in general you deliver lines that someone else has written. The next line has already been determined, much like the next step in your choreography. But that doesn’t mean we should just deliver it. In Meisner technique acting there is a set of exercises to simply wait. Wait for tension to build before the line is delivered. How many people in our society wait for that moment of awkwardness when two people are alone. Often one person will say something just to break the tension of the moment. But what if you waited, let the tension build a bit more.

What if the next time you’re with your lover and your practiced this. Right before the kiss, you just waited, hovered inches away from their face. Stared into their eyes and paused. Your breath mixing with theirs in the space, feeling the warmth of their breath, letting the tension slowly build, letting the hairs start to stand on end.

We all know what is going to happen next. But the WHEN is now a question. If there’s enough tension then even the HOW and the IF start to come into question.

What if all your dancing, every moment of it, had that kind of magnetic power and tension. (For that matter what if all your lovers knew to do this…)

Visualization

People have a natural curiosity and wonder about what other people are thinking. We can tell right away when someone is just drifting or focused on something. What if you used that to your advantage. What if you thought about what that next moment would be. Picture it in your mind, let the natural tension between what you want and what exists now build.

Books to Read

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body (Book & CD)

Sanford Meisner on Acting