I’m not alone!

I’ve been writing about improvisation and the freedom of following the music as you feel at the moment. I was excited to find a great article that summarizes the importance of improvisation, in case you haven’t read it yet, you can find it here.

When I read it, I felt like many others who left comments saying that every dancer should read it. I totally agree; I always felt the greatest joy of dancing when I was able to improvise freely to live music. For me, no choreography can match that feeling. Also, in my understanding, the highest level of the dance art is when you can connect to the music directly, and let it flow right through your body, so you don’t actually make conscious decisions about your dance movements, they just happen, triggered by the music.

As a teacher, I try to pass this feeling on to my students. From the very first class, I try to not only teach a movement, but also the way that movement can connect with the music, and I always encourage my students to just listen to the music and move with it, even if they haven’t learned much technique yet. We spend longer times with each movement, exploring different ways of doing it, like different tempo or range or direction, and then just play around with it for a while. I hope it will help the students to discover that steps and technique are meant to be tools for your free expression, and not for limiting your dance into “appropriate” movements.

I’m not against choreography though. I do use it as a learning tool, and also it’s a good way for group performances and practice. But I think, for solo performances, choreography is not necessary. In my experience, dancers like to use choreographies, because they don’t have self-confidence about their improvising skills, and they think that if they didn’t have a pre-learned set of movements for the specific music, then they could not perform well, and it wouldn’t look good. I think it’s mostly because teachers usually don’t address this topic, many are not an experienced improviser themselves. I admit, choreography can be “safer” than free dance – if you learned your steps well enough, then you don’t really have to work hard to put on a good-looking performance. But that would be more like a skilled craftsman’s work than a creation of art.

I wonder if it works like this: dancers use choreography when they want to dance for an audience, and improvise freely when they dance for themselves. For me, personal feelings are more important in dancing than outside reactions, so I definitely prefer free dance.

I know that improvisation is not easy. Sometimes you worry that you will run out of ideas in the middle of the song, and end up repeating the same four steps all the time. Transitions might be less crispy and clear, and it’s easier to forget about keeping a nice arm posture – at least these are the difficulties I face sometimes when I improvise. But I believe that a passionate, spontaneous interpretation of the music, even if a bit raw here and there,  can be more rewarding (for dancer and audience alike) than a choreography perfectly executed, but more detached from the spirit of the moment.

But of course, it’s just my own opinion about this topic. Still, I’m happy to know, that I’m not alone with it. 🙂

Shimmy dilemmas (Egyptian shimmy struggle part 1.)

I have to admit, after so many years of learning and practicing, I still have some difficulties about the Egyptian shimmy. Somehow, I just don’t seem to be able to find the right alignment and muscle tones to keep it steady. I can shake some, and it can look good, but I feel that the whole thing is not steady.

Also, Egyptian shimmy seems to be a very wide term, as I’ve seen many teachers explaining it in many different ways. For example about the weight: some teachers say, you should sit back on your heels, so steadily that you could lift your toes, while others start to teach it with your heels actually off from the floor, and you make some pumping movements with them. Also, some teachers will tell you to hold your lower abdominal muscles and glutes tightly while doing the shimmy, and others will want you to relax everything and just let the movement come up from your legs and shake your body. Those teachers all looked confident and smooth with their own version, so I wouldn’t dare to say that any of them was “wrong”. How do you do the Egyptian shimmy then? What’s the secret key? Or it’s just different for everybody? What is your way to do it?

Blood, sweat and tears. Really???

A good friend of mine has a nice and widely read blog, covering a variety of topics, focusing on women. So it was very natural that when she started to feel uncomfortable about her look and decided to change her lifestyle, loose some weight and get fit, she posted about it. She also posted pictures about her workout sessions, showing her sweaty and exhausted, but with that glow that comes with a good exercise. I found her words and pictures very inspiring, others felt that too, many started to share their own experiences, difficulties and victories about weight loss and exercise in general. I was happy to see that, but when I read comment after comment about how “boring” and “exhausting” workout is, I felt like maybe I could give them a different point of view about intense training. Can you guess what was in my mind? 🙂
So I wrote a longer post about how I see exercise and why I don’t do any “traditional” form of it, some of those reasons were based on my experience about Chinese medicine and philosophy about the human body. I also pointed out that workout doesn’t have to be “hard work”, you don’t necessarily have to do something that you don’t enjoy! And yes, I mentioned dance in general as a form of workout where you can actually forget about “workout” and just enjoy it, not to mention the other benefits of dance that a gym training wouldn’t provide: improved body-mind relation, awareness, coordination, grace of movement, etc. I also wrote about yoga as a spiritual-physical practice that has enormous benefits for your health, and that’s not even the real goal of it, you can gain much more from that.
So I wrote this post, emphasizing that it’s my own personal opinion and experience, and I really felt good about writing it, I was happy to show others a way of thinking they might not considered before. So you can imagine my shock when the next day I read the comments, and they were full of anger, saying that I’m a “new age” hippy, believing in myths and presenting them as the only truth. They said I sounded like I was writing for some silly magazine, without knowing what I was talking about. I really don’t mind if others have different opinions, and I wasn’t trying to “educate” them, and I would have never thought that anyone could find the tone of my post offending, so I was absolutely speechless when I got all those reactions. One of them was especially bitter, and at one point she was writing about how she thought that my ideas about exercise were bullshit, she said something like “ass shaking” is not workout and that you have to work hard, sweat and suffer if you want any result. That’s the way she said, the only way.

I feel sad for her. Probably she never had fun with her exercises, so she can’t believe it’s possible. She obviously never tried dancing, otherwise she wouldn’t brush it aside as it wasn’t anything useful. I was thinking about what to answer, but then I decided not to. It was clear to me that she didn’t want to think about what I said,so I saw no point in elaborating. So the “conversation” ended there. But I wish she would know me, if she could see what I was able to achieve without suffering. I don’t go to the gym, I don’t run and only occasionally ride a bike. I don’t do any of those “traditional workouts”. I dance. And sometimes I do yoga and some Chinese stuff I learned in Taiwan. And I have fun when I do those, and I learn things while I do them. And I teach dance because I love sharing the joy I experience from dancing.

I just learned to be more careful when I try to present my ideas about it to others.

Did you have any experience like this?