Joy in Motion

Hidden Essence: Is Your Dance a Forgery?

I love TED Talks; they have more awesome videos than I have time to watch! Yesterday I listened to Paul Bloom talk about how knowing the essence of something can make it more or less pleasurable. How could this not relate to dancing, and to our everyday lives? Here are some of the highlights of the talk (at least for me):

First, a few sentences from Bloom that sum up his argument. As you read this, think about the hidden essences that you look and feel for when you’re dancing:

“Humans are to some extent natural-born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don’t just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather our responses are conditioned by our beliefs about what they really are, where they came from, what they’re made of, what their hidden nature is. I want to suggest that this is true not just for how we think about things but how we react to things. So I want to suggest that pleasure is deep… Even the most seemingly simple pleasures are affected by our beliefs about their hidden essences.”

I also love his thoughts about why the distinction between an original work of art and its forgery is (or should be) so important to us:

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The Enduring Fascination: Tango and Chess

I just love pondering parallels between dance and other disciplines. Robert Grudin writes about this in The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation:

Inspiration often expresses itself as a sudden connection or closed circuit between ideas that had never before been so connected. The mind is open to inspiration to the extent that it is open to such continuities, whether between details (as with the combination of words in a fresh poetic metaphor) or between larger subject areas (as with some new combination of materials in a manufacturing process). By extension, the sense of continuity can extend to dynamic relationships between whole disciplines or ways of thinking. In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler names this process bisociation – the dynamic interaction between two normally distinct frames of reference. According to Koestler, all creative thought, from humor to philosophy and science, is bisociational, and creativity derives from a feeling for the implicit continuity of ideas.

On a seemingly unrelated note, I recently revisited a video I first watched earlier this year of a very young girl dancing tango with her father. So precious. Actually, the original video of the performance they did was (sadly) removed from YouTube, but luckily I was able to find another video of them dancing at home that is also pretty sweet. Check it out:

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The Difference Between Attraction and Distraction

What is it about someone’s dancing that makes us want to watch, and keep watching? Tango Beat’s post on April Fools’ Day brought me back to this question, which I think about often. Tango Beat wrote the following somewhat facetiously, but it echoes sentiments I’ve heard from many dancers.

This was my realization: Why should I be so meek, dancing just for one person, the woman in front of me? In my dream I reasoned that if my partner were sitting at the tables, she too would be watching his awesomeness.  She would not notice me—the guy who was taking subtle steps and moving to nuances in the music. She would not see how I had connected directly to my tanguera’s heart and entire being. She would not see that I was dancing with my partner’s soul, led to move only by the music rather than showing off what I just learned from a stage star.

I think it’s very common in the beginning to look at the biggest, the most obvious, the most dramatic. Unless we’ve had certain experiences in our lives that have made us sensitive to the nuances of movement, connection, and musicality, how do we know what to look for beyond what is most visually distracting?

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