Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Mind Over Matter: Know thyself

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts called "Mind Over Matter" that explore the importance and relevance of the psychological aspects of dancing.

In the last two posts in this series, I discussed the challenges of focusing on what not to do and trying to focus on too many things.

Of course, any instruction is ineffective if the student is not in tune with his or her own body. If you can't tell if or when you're doing something right, how can you consistently maintain or practice it?

Self-awareness is vital to self-improvement. Self-awareness informs us when we're doing something wrong, helps us work towards developing a new habit, and hopefully helps us distinguish between the two. Feedback from your partner can be helpful and informative, but it can also be misleading, and it may not help to fix problems. Knowledge of yourself and your own movement provides a different kind of independent feedback that allows for self-correction.

Self-awareness is tied to being present or being in tune with what your body is doing and how it feels. Even if you can't identify what exactly is happening, recognizing how different positions or movements feel is important for making adjustments. And, as with any physical movement, self-awareness requires practice to improve and become more comfortable with it. 

Of course, self-awareness can be a very internally-focused endeavor in a dance that involves a lot of external activities: leading and following, floorcraft, the music, etc. Finding the right balance between internal and external focus can feel schizophrenic. This is why I often suggest students practice self-awareness when practicing by themselves or in class, where the external distractions are limited.

How aware are you of your own movements when you dance? How has this changed over time? What has helped to improve your self-awareness? Teachers, how do you help your students become more self-aware?

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Take a little out

Last week's post explored the concept of pattern extensions as a way of adapting patterns to fit the music. 

Similarly, pattern compaction - the process of linking two patterns by replacing the anchor step with a rock-and-go - can also be used to help fit patterns to the music. For instance, compaction can help get to the end of a pattern to fit the phrase of a song, rather than hitting the phrase change in the middle of a pattern. Compaction can also create a rushed feeling that fits well to the build up of a song before a phrase change or break. 

The trick to successful pattern compaction is creating the spring action of the rock-and-go. Though you remove the anchor step - the triple that ends patterns - there should still be an anchor - the extension that results from changing direction. The leader will still slow down and change the direction of his own body, causing the follower to reach the end of the slot before being redirected down the slot again. The only difference is that in a rock-and-go this now happens in one beat and one step (the first step of the rock-and-go) rather than over two beats and three steps, as in an anchor step. Getting this stretch right is what facilitates a smooth and easy change of direction. 

Too often leaders aren't clear on the anchor, sometimes even pulling the follower out of her anchor step. In some ways, learning pattern compaction can help leaders improve their anchors by learning the difference between an anchor step and a rock-and-go, while also teaching followers to seek the stretch at the end of the slot. 

Have you learned pattern compaction? How do you use it in your dancing? Has it had any impact on how you execute your anchor steps? Teachers, do you teach pattern compaction? If so, how do you help students to get that spring action on the rock-and-go?

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Give a little more

As I noted in an earlier post, there are a lot of pattern dancers out there - people who know the beginning, middle, and end of what's next before it even begins. They don't necessarily connect with the music or adapt their patterns to fit what they're hearing.

This is where pattern extensions come in. A pattern extension is when a dancer adds an even number of beats to a movement to either delay its conclusion or delay the start of the next movement. They generally fall into three buckets or types:
  • Repeated movements, where the partners' positions relative to one another are kept the same but they keep moving;
  • Stopping, where the partners hold still for a period of time; and
  • Continuous movement, where the partners add movements in a fluid way to keep moving and delay the end of the pattern.
Aside from executing them clearly and comfortably, the trick, of course, is to use these pattern extensions where the music calls for them. Repeated movements (e.g. continuous whip, walks, side-to-side grooving, etc.) are best applied where - you guessed it - the music repeats, either lyrically or rhythmically. They are also useful where the music slows down and you want to slow down your dance as well. Stopping is most appropriate when the music stops or drops off in a significant way, either during breaks or as a transition to a lower energy part of the song. And continuous movement is useful to lengthen patterns where the song builds up, so that you keep moving and building while the song does the same. And I often use repeated movements and continuous movements for phrasing, particularly to extend a pattern to end on 1 of a new phrase, rather than ending during the build up to a phrase change.

We often learn pattern extensions by learning patterns or amalgamations that have extensions in them, but learning to view these tools separately and apply them where relevant is a valuable skill to have - for both leaders and followers. Leaders can use them to adjust their patterns to the music, while followers can use them to appropriately interrupt patterns to fit them to the music.

How have you learned pattern extensions? How do you think about them and use them? Teachers, do you teach your students about pattern extensions, and if so, how?

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Mind Over Matter: Staying focused

This is the third in a series of blog posts called "Mind Over Matter" that explore the importance and relevance of the psychological aspects of dancing.

The previous post in this series looked at the danger of focusing on what not to do. Another common problem with the way we're taught is that we're often given too many things to focus on.

Focus is a critical skill needed for advancing our dancing. It's how we train our bodies to develop new habits that replace the old ones. By focusing on continually and consistently doing something new, we learn to retrain our bodies, building muscle memory and a higher skill level that makes the new behavior become a habit - something we don't need to focus on any longer. However, without focusing on new behaviors, we're bound to continue repeating our old ones.

At the same time, the human brain can only focus on one thing at a time, and multitasking has negative effects on our ability to pay attention, control memories, and switch between tasks. So how can we make progress on any one thing when we're trying to work on several at once? How do we focus when there are half a dozen priorities?

It's hard enough to focus at all, given all the distractions while we're dancing. It's too easy to just revert to our usual dancing and not focus on anything. So imagine the challenge when we're given a laundry list of things to work on.

Learning to focus is important for progress, as is knowing what to focus on. Getting to the root cause of our problems and finding the right solution is sometimes difficult but makes learning and improving so much easier. And a good solution is something that addresses root causes while being easy for the mind to focus on. After all, if we can't focus on it, then we can't do it consistently enough to make it into a habit.

How do you stay focused on building new skills? How does staying focused affect your dancing? How do you prioritize what you work on? And teachers, how much do you consider your students' ability to focus when giving feedback or things for them to work on?