Is It Art?
Sport? Science?
by
Sandi
& Dan Finch
The great debate over the past
decade has been whether
dancing is an art or a sport. It might be better to ask how much of it
is
science.
A pre-schooler dabbling in
water colors isn’t making art (as
much as a mess) because he doesn’t have a knowledge of basic skills
that go
into composition, shading, and the other aspects of good art. Likewise,
we all
want to see ourselves as beautiful dancers (read “artful”) but before
beauty
there has to be a reckoning with some basic laws of physics.
Forgetting the principle of
three-dimensional space causes
most of the problems we see in coaching. If either partner only dances
his own
body, he is thinking two dimensionally. Dancing involves rotation and
for that
to work, the partnership must figure out how to get both its front half
(partner) and back half (leader) through the step.
Imagine driving a car around
the corner. The driver has to
calculate how sharp the turn is and the size of the car. Picture one of
those
old Cadillac Eldorados, with the hood that seemed to go on forever. The
dynamics of driving it through the turn are different than for a VW
van, where
the driver practically sits on top of the front bumper.
In other words, when we dance,
the length of our “vehicle”
is the space from the leader’s spine to the partner’s spine. In dance
position,
either partner may only be thinking about the figure and what he or she
does,
but both partners have to coordinate to get through that figure.
We have all seen a feather
finish that ended with partners
hip to hip. A closed telemark where the partner feels like she’s being
strangled. A natural twist turn when the leader doesn’t time his unwind
with
his partner’s run-around. A maneuver where partner gets to the end
before her
leader.
To fix this, you need to start
with a solid frame, with
elbows slightly in front of the body. Next, imagine pushing a shopping
cart
through the turn. You need to recognize there are insides and outsides
of every
turn. One partner will have to travel further than the other. What
determines
the amount of turn is how far the leader goes past his partner. The
person
going forward has the bigger step.
We can practice this by dancing
solo holding a chair in
front of us or just extending our arms in front, to see the form that
must be
moved through space. It will then be obvious that “dancing is not about
me,
it’s about us.”
From club
newsletters prepared by an
and Sandi Finch , February 2015, and
reprinted
in the Dixie Round Dance Council (DRDC)
Newsletter, September 2016.
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