Happy Sunday!
Dancing contains endless lessons for life. Here’s five things I’ve reflected on while fancy walking to sound waves.
Diversify
I’m pretty sure everything I’ve learned from dance comes from trying different styles. Swing, waltz, hip hop, salsa, Argentine tango—each has its own way of moving energy between people, and trying polar opposite dances is the only way I can realize the uniqueness of each style I’ve danced before. I like the idea that you can’t see outside of where you are until you go somewhere else. Hopping around to completely different environments is a great way to get in touch with the environments you were in before, and how you’ve changed since.
Extension and compression
Different dances play with energy in different ways. My favorite dance is West Coast Swing because the it’s so centered on the dynamics of extension and compression. Remember constructive interference from high school math? Me niether. Just think of that thing of when two waves join up and become one big wave with energy of both waves combined. I think that’s the best way to describe what happens in WCS, which I have expertly diagrammed below.
The pink and blue waves represent dancers, and the green is the tension and compression as they move towards and away from each other. In the most basic WCS pattern, the lead slides their weight backwards, gently pulling the follow towards them. At the point of fullest extension, the lead changes direction at the same time that the follow lets their momentum carry them towards the lead. They come together in a wonderful explosion of WCS magic, then push off of each other again.
The name of that pattern, by the way, is a “sugar push”—a nod to the dancers getting close enough to kiss when they come together. Evidently, someone made the astronomical IQ leap to “gimme some shuga.” Look, I don’t make the names, but the important thing is that this pattern contains a thousand metaphors for life, from the ebbs and flows of the everyday to the brief and wonderful magic of crossing paths with another person before going in your own ways again. I definitely spend a lot of energy trying to avoid tension in life, but WCS reminds us that tension is the very basis of all connection, and only by inviting and leaning into it do you get compression and resistance and momentum, the basic ingredients for spinning something beautiful.
And because dance-diagram-life-metaphors are fun, here’s the follower floor pattern for an ocho in Argentine tango:
Rather than the tension/compression of WCS, the tango pattern seems to infinitely convert the momentum of a stride into a circular/pivot motion, and then back into linear movement again. I’ll let you make your own conclusions about what kind of patterns and energy the ocho represents in life.
Doing the moves isn’t the point
Ballroom dance is only able to connect people because it has a specific structure of steps and dynamics that everyone follows. At the same time, moving according to the rules is really just a way of connecting and having fun with someone else. It’s something I remind myself of when I get caught up in technique, or worry about not having enough moves under my belt. I also think it’s a pretty useful metric when asking whether norms and structures in general are productive, or when it’s okay to break them. Will following the rules help everyone have fun and share deeper experiences with each other? If doing the steps to a T comes at the expense of having a great connection with your partner, you’re misunderstanding the reason the rules are there in the first place.
A little goes a long way
My best weekend of dance ever was at a West Coast Swing convention in LA. Every night, there was social dancing, which is just a big room of people grooving with randos and practicing things they learned that day.
My favorite workshop from that weekend was an hour of being as creative and goofy as possible—no new patterns. We just played with wonky footwork, off-beat timing, getting low and on our tippy toes; anything and everything to get comfortable feeling uncomfortable. One reason that workshop was so great is that when you’re learning an activity like dance, you learn it in mechanical blocks. First you do this, then you do this. Put your feet here, bend your knees here, and move your frame in one piece. Unfortunately, when you put that together in social dancing—a loose and improvisational setting—it all comes off as extremely rote. On the first night of social dancing at the conference, my biggest worry was that I was boring: I only know how to do like 3 things! Don’t I need, like, way more practice to even be out here?
I arrived and left that conference as, hands down, one of worst dancers there. But between the first and last night, my experiences on the floor were worlds apart. It wasn’t because I had better technical knowledge; I was using almost exactly the same moves as before. But being challenged to move my body in new and uncomfortable ways helped me be more open to how the music wanted me to move. Even though I hadn’t learned any new steps, I reacted more freely to what I heard, and I shed a good bit of the beginners’ stiffness that inevitably comes with learning something new.
I notice something similar all the time when I practice the follower role with a teacher: even when the teacher only use the same moves I already know, they combine and play with them in completely different ways. I know this sounds like something I’ve just pulled off my LinkedIn feed, but sometimes approaching what feels like a technical limitation as a creative limitation is just what you need. When I get hung up on my skills or experience at something, I often think back to that weekend: is this actually a limit of my abilities? How can I have the most fun with the steps I do have? How can I make the most basic components of this thing feel good?
Connection is the shit
Compared with the strong and cohesive frame required in ballroom, my first hip hop class made me feel like I was wearing stilts and a neck brace. It also didn’t help that I was getting showed up by literal 6 year olds in the most braggadocious, in-your-face art form there is. Nevertheless, in light of my philosophy about diversification, I was determined that branching out into the bass, bump and flow of hip hop would be one of the best things I could do as a ballroom dancer.
This may sound like the confession of a stiff and bitter ballroom purist, but in the end it wasn’t the time commitment, frustration, or even a gangsta 6-year-old that made me quit hip hop: I missed having a partner. The swagger and confidence that glues us to a hip hop routine is really made possible because it’s an individual dance. I don’t just do dance to move my body in new ways, I do it because moving with someone is uniquely scary and fun. Partner dances present a very particular challenge: how can me and this other person work use a shared, silent language to create something that looks and feels awesome?
The best dancer is the one who’s having the most fun, and ultimately, coordinating your every move with another body is what I find to be the most rewarding part of dance. Connection, dear reader, is the shit.
Well, enough of squeezing 21st century life lessons out of the most primal, universal and dope form of human connection there is. Get out there, learn some new fancy walking, and forget about life for a bit. Your mind, body, and soul will thank you.
Until next time,
Lucas