I think thinking is OK – just not at the same time as dancing!
This story is about Golf, but I'm sure it applies to dancing too.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/...st/7859385.stm
Interestingly it's OK for beginners to think about what they're doing, though.
This means it's questionable whether we should have a "Lets Talk about Dance" forum (except for Beginners' Corner), of course.
Love dance, will travel
I think thinking is OK – just not at the same time as dancing!
Let your mind go and your body will follow. – Steve Martin, LA Story
I think, with any skill, the key to mastery is "relaxed focus".
You need to be able to do it right, obviously. But to get "good", you also need to be able to relax; that's why all the greats make it look effortless.
It's not effortless, of course, it's taken them thousands of hours of practice to get that way.
There's a fairly well-known dance progression process, which is worth mentioning again:
- Stage 1: Unconscious incompetence (you're doing it wrong but don't know it)
- Stage 2: Conscious incompetence (you're doing it wrong but know it)
- Stage 3: Conscious competence (you're doing it right but need to think about it)
- Stage 4: Unconscious competence (you're doing it right and don't need to think about it)
So "relaxing" is only worthwhile when allied to "focussing".
Last edited by David Bailey; 2nd-February-2009 at 01:41 PM. Reason: Oops
Hmm, I believe there are times to think about what your doing and your technique and then there are times to just let go and 'dance'
Hopefully, some of the time you spent thinking, will remain in your muscle memory and will stay with you, even when you let go.
And on the flip side, some of the most exciting variations I've found myself coming up with, have come to me, when I've been slightly tipsy and all inhibitions gone!
Its at that moment, I think, Hmm... "I wish I could bottle that", so I could practice it again and again(which would then involve 'thinking' about it), so that I could do it whenever I wanted!
I'm not sure any of that made any sense? I know what I mean anyway!
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"If you're going to do something tonight, that you know you'll be sorry for in the morning, plan a lie in." Lorraine
This is why I love the blues room at 3o'clock and gone.... I get past a point of being able to think. My brain closes down a bit and I can just relax back into the music. It's when the good stuff really happens... but hey... that's just me
Herbert Simon came up with one of the more interesting definitions of intuition: "analysis frozen into habit". I find that a good way of understanding learned behaviour (and it's a much nicer turn of phrase than 'muscle memory').
The principle is similar to the process that David described: when we start learning a new activity, we think about it. Assuming we repeat it often enough, we reduce the conscious component of processing; it becomes subconscious (in cogsci terms, it's really automatic processing, rather than truly subconscious, but that's a fairly pedantic distinction). But there are a couple of twists that make it quite interesting.
Firstly, we often move the cognitive effort up the scale. For example, when learning to drive, we learn to change gear by releasing the accelerator, pushing the clutch in, moving the gear lever, releasing the clutch, and pressing back on the accelerator. When we're learning, we tend to think in terms of each component as an action that we have to consciously process. As we improve, we focus less on each element, and more on the whole, until "changing gear" becomes an action. Then we focus more on when to change gear, rather than how to change gear (over time, that, too, becomes semi-automatic; the conscious focus shifts to driving, worrying about traffic, etc).
If we've learnt it well, we can usually slide back down the scale, where neaded - so if we miss a gear, we can think about how each part of changing gear. Or in a new car, we can think about the elements of changing gear until we get the feel of the car. But these are typically brief forays, very focused processing on a specific issue.
This is nicely analogous to dancing. When we start, we're trying to think about everything (where to put our feet, how to move our arms, finding the beat). As we improve, these things become increasingly automatically processed, so we can think in terms of sequences of moves and finding the shape of the music. We may still revert when a move gets messed up, or dancing with an unfamiliar partner. But most of the time, we're conscious at a completely different level.
That segues back into David's framework. As we become 'unconsciously competent' of one element of dancing, if frees our limited cognitive capacity to focus on other elements. This can be both moving upwards (from knowing steps, to knowing moves, to dancing to music) and sideways (learning more and more moves; focusing on musicality). Or unrelated to the physical activity of dancing (holding a conversation while dancing).
Secondly (yes, I am going on ... blame the snow) the key to learning is repetition. This means if we repeat anything often enough, we learn it. That doesn't mean that what we're learning is good, right, or anything else. This starts to break down the progression from unconscious incompetence. That progression only applies where there is a clear standard (what's 'right' and what's 'wrong') and some mechanism for assessment (am I doing it 'right'). Without those things, learning stops being a progression towards competence and a more basic process of habit forming. There's no guarantee those habits will be good. It's easy to fix - but requires some standard against which 'right' and 'wrong' are defined.
As we learn to dance, what we consciously process changes - we focus less on steps and more on other things. But this is not the same as actually getting better.
Correct.
And the whole philosophy/principles behind this has it's origins in the famous book 'The Inner Game of Tennis' - later followed by 'The Inner Game of Golf' (recommended).
See http://www.theinnergame.com/
It has since been applied to many other human endeavours - eg. in business as well as hobbies - and, er, even meeting women/men.
I'm not sure about the Inner Game of Dancing - maybe there is a gap here - and I suggest there could be sufficient expertise on the forum to put it together.
Yes - this has been brought home to me vividly through learning Tango; you basically need to be competent at many things, all at the same time, to dance AT competently.
Posture, timing, clarity of lead, balance, pre-leading, floorcraft, footwork, focus - you need to do all of them at the same time. So, once I've managed to get one of these elements OK (e.g. lead), I can then start working on others (e.g. footwork). But I can't do all of them at once.
And one thing which makes MJ so easy to pick up is that, in MJ, you don't need to have all these things at a high level initially - you can get away with far fewer, and the bar is far lower.
But what this doesn't mean is that you can just "relax" and it'll suddenly come to you in some mystic way. You need to be able to do it (conscious competence), before you can relax into it (unconscious competence).
Of course, once you are at that level, you do relax and people can tell - the whole "he / she makes it look so easy" thing. Yes, he / she does, but that's because he / she has spent a long time when it's been damned hard.
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