Movin' Easy Dancewear

Today I made a shift in my dancing.  Openness happened.  My feet went where my heart went.  My body took its place as the mover of me and my Ginger.  My reluctance to hold my own weight again showed itself as I whooshed Ginger across the floor and let her weight pull me off balance.  I made a new commitment to bring all of myself to the dance.

My brain cooperated even with the wide eyed fear that is normal for me. When my feet stopped to let my hands learn their move, I quickly brought my brain along to connect the two.

My breath comforted me and I was able to look in Ginger’s eyes in a new way.  Clunkiness and struggle gave way to fluid motion.  Jerry our teacher was all “Yes.” and “Alright.” acknowledging the night to day shifts that were happening.

Learning to Lead notes 081909,  single class with Randy Ferguson at Dance Institute

Ginger

I really felt better when you were making a place for me to move.

I was not afraid you were going to pull me around and leave me off balance.

I like that suggestion that you give me time to get to the beat of the music before going through to the next move.

You were taking smaller steps and bringing me with you.

Tim

Directionality.  Wow.  Remember it.  So much easier to bring Ginger with me when I am clear with the diagonals of the Silver Foxtrot.  Going through this again will hopefully stick.

Shift my weight and take Ginger with me.  That is the cue I still need to learn.  It is coming.

Keeping Ginger within my frame is of course the biggest fault.  I want to use one arm to twist and the other to push to make sure Ginger goes where I want.  Gate image is a good one; I open the gate to give Ginger the direction she is to go.

Using my head and eyes is a missing element when I am concentrating so hard.  I got just a moment’s feeling of taking my head in the direction of the movement and making eye contact in the process rather than trying to keep eye contact all the time.

How can I stop charging away leaving Ginger behind?  Take her to the beat of the music at the end of a movement sequence and enjoy her being there.  Then move on to the next movement.  My tendency is to charge through the beat without acknowledging that we have arrived there…together.

Ballroom, Swing, Tango, Salsa, Scandinavian, Contra-whatever the style, the beginning class is so beautiful.  Everyone is transformed into a band of alien explorers on a distant planet.  No one is safe and yet together they know they will get each other through.  Every type of alien is there, the shy, the awkward, the cool, the stubborn, the bossy, even the “how did I get here” humanoid.

Whether the class is in a secluded studio or the hottest night club, their is an air of excitement like the space ship has landed and what will we do now.

The first test of man with woman comes way too soon and there you have two people with empty brains trying to navigate on an alien planet.  The smile, the grimace, the pause, and then the music begins.  “I can’t really get this.”  “Sorry I got your toe.”

Then the fun begins.  “Oh I think I know this, try just a little of this”  “That’s better, didn’t think I could do that.”  Giggles and chuckles become laughs and then you change partners.  The next partner is moving with a little more bounce or charges the movement different somehow.  Then the next partner floats from move to move and you wonder where you are in the dance.

Catching the fun of each partner is like bouncing a balloon around the room at a party.  Some people send it straight to you and some people are just playing.

Stuck.  Two partners inevitably find themselves in a frozen piece of alien ice.  To the rescue, the social dance instructor.  These are your highly skilled navigators trained on the best starships.  The whole body is their tool kit and in one minute, the partners are unstuck, laughing or gliding away with serious looks on their faces.

In the whole evening there are probably at least 10,000 breaths of relief that every person there actually had fun and that no one was devoured by their partner.  Sometimes an alien planet is the best place to be.

Best kept secret in Austin Ballroom is Dance International kids ballroom camps.  Delightful mom and daughter, eight years old,  were in Movin’ Easy today talking about their summer camp.  “My daughter spent the summer doing a game that Stewart taught them.  She would listen to different styles of music and say which dance you would do to that music.  It was phenomenal.  I could see her little mind working and then she would say, ‘Mom, that’s a cha cha.”

The she told about how much her daughter learned in one week.  “I was astounded.  They had a show and they were really dancing.”

Wow.  Criticism flies on So You Think You Can Dance right up to the final night.  Thank you Nigel, Mary, and all.  Your criticism educates us on the fine points of dance technique and gives a look inside what it takes to “Bring It.”  We see dancers changing right in front of our eyes, going to the limit of “bring it” with an amazing mixture of connecting with personal emotion and transforming that emotion through their own unique personalities and perfected movements.

For us novices, the question is how do you standing in front of that many people, pouring out all your guts and face the critiques of not just the movements but whether you completely committed yourself to the movement and how well you showed your personality through it.

Dancers walk into class every day looking straight at every possible thing that needs tweeking in order to be come a better dancer.  Here is what an advanced dancer from Austin, Texas says, ” People need to learn that criticism is good.  The teacher is helping you and seeing potential in you.  If they did not think you could do it, they would not give you the correction.  Listen to the teacher, try it and be grateful and respectful.  If you do not show the teacher that you love dancing that much, you will not get all the teacher has to offer you.”

Everyone has different goals in finding a dance school.  Here is one mom:” We have gone to several schools and my daughter has finally found the school that works for her.  She did not like the heaviness of tap, something about jazz didn’t work.  Ballet is what she likes.  In ballet, she responded so much more to moving across the floor and to having a directed free time to dance at the end of class.”

I am constantly amazed watching dancers who do the most difficult moves and with so much brightness as if they are savoring every single second of their dancing.

Where does the dancer go to find such a blinding light of passion and brilliant anticipation?  That is the question for the consummate professional and yet we all know the place, at least in quick glimpses.

The dancer trains to return to that place where the entire brain opens and every cell of the body prepares to engage.  The dancer stands on a precipice of the overpowering imagination that demands a complete union with the dancer’s determination.

It is at this juncture that the dancer learns moment by moment to embrace and hold the hand of the creator in a special way.  The words work and frustration and passage come into play.  And it is here that the dancer must learn to nurture and honor their own being that is given to them as a gift to participate in the dance.  It is here that the dancer must embrace themselves while they welcome the lightening fast and the thunderously slow exploration of at least six dimensions in space.

And how can we as audience or friend grasp any of these extraterrestrial journeys?  Oh yes, of course, we are human as well.  We come to the same juncture every moment and make our choice toward delightful command, toward humble determined effort, and toward the nurtured embrace of all that we call good.

We all know the moment.  It is when we pull ourselves up to our tallest and take a breath like we really mean it and our next step, our next word comes totally from everything that we are.  Yes, we pass a lot of those moments by and we try to pull up past memory as if those moments were a limited edition and not available to us always.

Dance is only a teacher of how to bring our entire being to face the beauty and the darkness in every moment of this life.  But it takes a moment by moment choice for both the professional and the novice.

I reach for dance.  Dance reaches for my heart.  I reach more for dance.  Dance explodes in my muscles and captures the light beaming from my eyes and my face.  Yet, I stand on this side of a wide cavern my feet frozen to the earth.  This body, this brain will only enter the dance territory that I am willing to love.

It’s some kind of quirk in my genetic makeup I am sure.  If I do not love the breath before the move, my body gives a thud.  If I do not carry the love all the way from my foot touching the floor, my move is only a clunk.  And if I do not love the rush of the air and the blur of the light behind my partner, my grasp is a clinch and not a graceful hold.

A question for ballerina and choreographer Gina Patterson:  I want to dance WITH Ginger as I learn to lead.  I charge the movement and pull her around and we seem stuck.  Can you help me?

Yes Gina helped.  She watched a few moves of our Silver foxtrot and Bronze Cha Cha.   Two suggestions changed our dancing right then. Here is what she said:  make eye contact at the beginning of a movement and then breath together at that moment.

Both suggestions became expanding insights for me.  Making eye contact took my attention away from what I can only describe as balderdash which is defined as grabbing my body, freezing my breath, and squeezing my brain to remember the move and attack the space.

Releasing all of that balderdash came only with the addition of an inhale shared with Ginger.  What a difference a little shared oxygen makes.  The crimped feeling in the back of my throat gave way to a rising and falling in my chest.  Something became totally different in the way I was feeling, standing, and yes moving with Ginger.

Clear and firm in her direction, she blossoms one Pilates move into the next and I only go along for the ride.  Do you dance I ask and she says she is too old at twenty or something less.  So I say, “Well you know there is more to know and especially if you dance, your teaching will expand all this creativity you are molding for me and all the rest.”

So the future flashed before our eyes and there she was at The Pilates Studio Austin leading me once more beyond where my body wanted to go.  “What you said about dance is true, I am really feeling stronger in my moves.”  She said it without knowing the smile that lit up her whole body.  And then she let it slip, the belly dance that took so much concentration to ride the tide, the ballet that passed the brilliance of her body into thin air, and the splash of energy in learning Salsa first time at Copa’s.  Then She said,”I think I will go learn Salsa.  Uptown Dance is right near my house.”