He Had Me at Play...
This past weekend, Tom and I attended a Ballroom Dance Bootcamp held in concert with other studios in our region.
The studio owners had invited their teachers from Europe to teach master classes and do coaching sessions for the students.
It was a scene. I mean...ballroom culture is a scene...and then some.
We had fun. We learned new things. We laughed. We are STILL laughing.
I love doing these types of things (putting myself in novel movement experiences) as someone who is always and endlessly fascinated by the process of motor learning.
There are so many ways to learn movement, and to teach movement, and one's ability to change, pivot, and alter the approach (as a student or a teacher) as needed is what makes teaching (and learning) alive!
As many of you know, I do think work and play can play together. Even though play is often defined as the opposite of work. And work is defined as the opposite of play. But I still find the either/or here to be not only limiting, but not at all true to my lived experience. To me they are the best dance/life partners.
In our bootcamp, one of our Samba teachers said this: "You must give yourself permission to play with the rhythm, the timing. Play with how your body expresses this." I thought, "Ok, he had me at play!" He went on about how dancing Samba can make one feel (emotionally, energetically) as opposed to placing all of the emphasis on the idea of a correct "form" or appearance. That robs the dance of the DANCE!
I could also see how deflated some of my friends were when they were overcorrected, or when they got into the mindset of trying to do things the "one correct" way. This made their body/nervous system freeze or become overly self-conscious to the point of "choking" or losing their ability to self-organize.
Our nervous system naturally handles complexity by reducing degrees of freedom to bias stability and a (temporary) reduction in variability.
We might move in a stiff or awkward way, not because we are tight but because our body needs time, practice, and play to be able to relax enough within the movement task to allow for greater complexity and multi-joint, coordinated movement. Our nervous system, in effect, freezes degrees of freedom until we are ready to handle said freedom.
Telling a person that they are stiff or tight, only makes them "tighter". There is a reason why their nervous system expresses a freeing or a freezing strategy.
This is a place PLAY and FUN can come in and help. Sometimes people just need to play. Sometimes teachers need to play, and to be willing to think more creatively about how they might better help a student.
One of the best things we can do for stability and ease in movement is to invite our body to move intuitively, in 3- dimensional movement patterns.
By challenging our stability, mobility, and motor control in playful ways--ways that gradually increase range of motion and load, and/or things like rate, rhythm, visual, auditory, or proprioceptive focus. This is how stability and ease are enhanced, how we increase degrees of freedom, and open ourselves up to new options.
Over the weekend I had many wonderful conversations with students from other studios about why they were there, why they dance, and what they do outside of dance.
One woman had been a special education teacher and told me a very moving story about two young twin sibling immigrants from Vietnam, and how her approach to teaching one of them how to read had to be completely different from that of the other. She said none of her previous approaches were getting through to the little boy, and the challenge of finding a way in required her to leave the box of her previous education and personal teaching methods. She did wind up getting through! She started to tear up when recounting the story of this little boy beginning to read aloud, by himself, making the connection between the printed word, what it represented, and the power of the stories the words held. He learned not only to read, but to LOVE the world that reading had opened for him.
I asked her what she loved the most about dancing. She said she knew all the reasons why dance was "good" for her (Improved balance, cognition, exercise, etc). But the real reason behind her dancing? Because it is FUN. She said that even though she wanted to look good, she did not really care if her steps or lines were aesthetically pleasing. She was there to have fun.
Tom had said the very same thing to me on one of our breaks. He said his litmus test for a dance class was this: was it fun or not. FYI- We started taking a Hip Hop/Street Styles class at Steps on Broadway recently, and though it is challenging (I mean...we MOVE!), it is an insane amount of fun. Here we are, almost 60, doing hip hop, not caring about "right or wrong", and having FUN!
Now practice is not always fun, that is true. Plenty of things that are important and essential in life are not fun. But I keep this question close by, in times of difficulty, when facing a challenge:
How might I play with this? How might I give myself permission to play? To exercise some semblance of freedom (and fun) within the experience. This way of being helps make the challenges of life and learning less intimidating, and more approachable.
Let's PLAY!