Dance Pointers

I might have called this post “Dance Philosophy”, or “Best Practices”, but that would imply that I have checked it for self-consistency and so-forth. This is a set of beliefs/observations that I have about leading, and I am completely happy if other people don’t hold the same beliefs, but I will defend my beliefs if attacked (maybe “Dance Theology” would be more appropriate). I make no comments about which bits apply to following as well.

1) If you are having trouble dancing with a follow (of any ability), then a good solution is *always* to become a better lead.

1.1) Telling a follow that she’s doing something “wrong” is *always* the wrong thing to do.
1.1.1) In most cases, she can feel that something’s wrong, and so doesn’t need to be told.
1.1.2) You will (in most cases) be incapable of explaining it in words.
1.1.3) In most cases, it’s because you’re doing it wrong yourself.
1.1.4) If you can lead the difference between doing it “wrong”, and doing it “right”, then it will be more effective than words (see point 1).
1.1.5) Telling someone that they should *not* do something is dangerous.
1.1.5.1) What you want someone not to do may be exactly what someone else wants them to do in some situation.
1.1.5.2) If you can show people alternatives, and let them pick for themselves, this will reduce the number of people doing the “wrong” thing, without removing their ability to do so if the need arises.

1.2) If you find yourself wanting to “know” more “moves”, then this is a sign that your understanding of the things you already “know” is not strong enough.
1.2.1) It is more enjoyable to play with the subtleties of a few moves than a lot of different moves done in the same way.
1.2.2) If there are 7 independent layers of lead/follow (ask Andrew Sutton for a list and he will consistently produce at least that many (though they may not always be the same 7)) then you have at least 2^7=128 variations on each move. If you get bored with 2^7, then try 3^7 and so on.

1.3) If you are getting a lot of awkward moments, then you need to go back to basics.
1.3.1) If your connection is broken, you will be impossible to follow.
1.3.1.1) If your frame is too weak then your follow will not be able to feel what you want her to do.
1.3.1.2) If your frame is too rigid/jerky, it will break your follow’s frame. Similarly, if you break your frame by doing an awkward arm lead, then it will break your follow’s frame.
1.3.1.3) If you have too little tension, your follow may not know when you want her to move (especially problematic with fast music).
1.3.1.4) If you have too much tension, then your follow will feel too forced, and have no freedom to do her own thing (especially in slow music, and music she knows well). This is often referred to as a lack of responsiveness.
1.3.1.5) All of the above things affect all of the above things
1.3.2) Having “just enough” control to reliably lead what you want is ideal.
1.3.2.1) It is important to find out what “just enough” is for every follow.
1.3.3) If you are doing a lot of different “moves” then you both need to “know” them and get them “right” in order to avoid conflicts.
1.3.4) If you are doing lots of subtle variations on basic moves, then there will be no conflict if your follow ignores them.
1.3.4.1) If there is a conflict, then your “subtle variation” is not a subtle variation.

To be continued, I suspect.

If someone wants to expand this onto a wiki somewhere, please do so. I’m thinking that each of the points should be the title of a page, with each page being a stub with a “Consider first” link pointing to its parent, “Consider also” links pointing to its siblings, and “Consider next” pointing to its children. It would then be possible to flesh out each page with an “Examples” section.

Private Lesson

In Body related news, I think my back is strengthening up again. Mostly because I’ve been doing lots of dancing. I expect that by the end of LLX, I’ll be up for aerials and whatnot.

I had a private lesson with Gerald yesterday. We did a lot of body control and posture stuff, which was good for me. It took a lot of time to get started, because my posture is really quite bad. I’m not sure whether we genuinely fixed it, or whether it was a case of “That’s as good as it’s going to get. Let’s move on.” The idea of splitting your body into two sections and controlling them separately is useful. It lets you be aware of where they both are makes it easier to notice when you break your core, and feed back this information to correct it next time. Everything else we did really stems from there.

In my understanding, it seems that when you’re dancing basics, there are 3 things that you should be monitoring: your chest section, your pelvis section, and your partner’s chest section. Once you can be sure that you’re controlling your own sections, you should notice when one of them is not where you want it, and feedback (subtly) on the next basic, to correct.

The really intriguing part of the lesson was the end: When we were finishing off, I was quite quick to say “I have my cheque book”, which was a little “I have just bought that time and knowledge off you” of me. His response was difficult to interpret: He was very reluctant to take money in payment. Now I initially thought that this was because he didn’t want to take money from a student, but I’m not so sure: He asked me if I could teach *him* anything that would be interesting to him, so that it could be a knowledge exchange. When I eventually managed to force some money on him, I felt like it wasn’t nearly as much as the lesson was worth to me.

The exchange showed me that we seem to share a few important ideas: “Knowledge is worth more than money, so any exchange involving money will always be unfair.” Also: “It’s better to come off worse in a deal. That way, the other party will always feel the need to repay the debt.” The thing I *didn’t* realise was that he did a PhD in computer vision and augmented reality (this came out when I was trying to think of things I could teach him). Not only that, but he did a couple of years in industry before doing it. Now I was planning to do about 4 years in industry before going for a PhD, but I can see why it might be a good idea to do it after 2. I think I have even more respect for him now.

So we come to the problem of “What can you teach a man who has spent N more years exploring the same stuff you’re interested in?”

The only thing that I’ve thought of so far is that I might be able to teach him some linux crap: He knows C/C++, but uses windows XP on his laptop. He doesn’t use java or C#, so he’s unlikely to be locked in by the same stuff that Alex is screwed by. It might be that he already uses it, but needs windows for iTunes, or it might be that he simply doesn’t use it (for whatever reason).

In the first case, I could show him around Amarok, and tailor my moodbar project to him (he has trouble picking songs that have the right tempo, and he said that it would be useful). In the second case, I could probably tweak a distro for him, and show him around. I expect it would be OpenSuse, or Hardy with instructions to just do security updates, because Ubuntu’s upgrade process has fucked up too many of my friends’ installs.

In other news, I found a way to get around my problem of having no access to external servers on which to play teeworlds: Set up my own on soup.linux.pwf.cam.ac.uk . If anyone fancies a game: prod me, and I’ll fire it up again. Because it registers itself on the internet, you get lots of random players joining, which is cool. I might see if I can mod the server to gather some statistics. See if I can train a bot or something. That way, if attacks me for running an IP server on PWF, I can say that it’s a research project, relevant to my course.