Dancing, following, teaching, becoming

During a ballrooming class I taught with Chris, I got a question from one of the follows: "How do I keep this posture without getting tense?"

Good question. Excellent question. Because tension has gotten in the way of my following a whole lot. I've been searching, dancing, experimenting an answer to this question for a long time - at least since the first Southern Belle Swing Bash when I asked Nina and Naomi where I could just learn to follow better: "Is there a certain teacher, a workshop, some place I can go, something you can put your finger on?" Short answer: No. Naomi gave some good advice, but it was Nina's answer I really remember: "It's a personal journey." Amen, sister. I hated the answer at the time, but that was what she gave me, so I took it and have been working it out ever since.

So whenever I teach, I always want to have things to say to the follow. Not just yackety schmackety stuff to say so I'll at least be talking, but real things follows can pay attention to in their own bodies or a reminder to be patient and kind to leads who are learning. But how to relax? Because for me and for a lot of follows (leads, too), this is the real issue. And I wonder how much it has to do with freedom...

I think I've realized that there's only so much I can teach someone. I may be able to guide someone. I may be able to show/tell people how to hold their bodies so that they are highly likely to experience the sensation I want them to experience so that they can learn what I'm teaching. I may be able to give them metaphors so they can relate to this concept on a more visceral or personal level. I can't teach anyone to relax. The best I can do is create an environment where they are engaged, laughing, and open to trying out new movement... and voila! They are relaxed. This is the bigger part of teaching. I feel like I just realized that I could stumble out of Plato's cave.

Working up to the ballrooming lesson was really a gift. It helped my own ballrooming follow technique so much, and I made a huge step where teaching is concerned. For the first time ever, I taught a class strictly from my own style & technique... and I wasn't terrified. The ideas I presented were mine. The posture I taught came from my experience. I was surprisingly confident about my own ability; this is entirely new for me. Normally I doubt and fret and worry, but I was free from that.

I began by breaking down my ballrooming posture - the place I find my body most likely and able to respond, where I am most pliable and mobile. And I found that it was the same posture for running that I'd learned years before in my one semester of modern dance. It's also the same as the posture I adopt if I'm running down a really steep hill and decide to give myself over to gravity and just do a full-out run - I end up extending my torso at both ends and therefore stabilizing my core so that there's little or no noticeable pulse. I was thrilled to find these things! It was much like a treasure hunt. But in teaching this, I found that the posture alone doesn't give pliability or mobility. A lot of the follows were adopting that posture and then freezing it, not moving with it. I'm not sure how to tell them to relax into the posture; I'm not sure if I can. The most I could say at the time is that you should maintain energy and stretch within your own body even before the lead gives you any direction: your willingness and readiness for movement is one of the best tools you can give a lead. I also told them, once I found they were stopping/freezing/tensing their bodies in order to preserve the "ballrooming posture" I'd given them, is that the posture is a guideline, a good place to start, a reference point, and leads will likely lead them outside of the bounds of this posture. A good example is an up hesitation, where you're on your toes stretching up as far as you can go. It's definitely ballrooming, but the posture is not this stance I showed them. The goal as a follow is to go there with him, not maintain a posture that some teacher gave you.

So I was a little dismayed. I'd discovered this basic posture to teach, had them work with it and practice it both alone and partnered, and then they froze it instead of moving with it or exploring it or expanding it. Instead of taking the kernel idea that following is the ultimate goal and that I've found that this posture enables me to follow most and best, they put posture first because it was something they could hold onto. It follows. I should have expected it because that's by and large how people work, but I must say it blind sighted me - I didn't expect it at all. I've been looking at the Torah a little, so it reminds me of Moses leading the people to the Promised Land. At a certain point, the people got fed up with a god who's invisible and whom they don't understand, so they made a gold calf and worshipped it. Simple. They could touch the gold cow. It was nothing other than a gold cow, but they could definitely touch it. And Moses kept leading them, kept hoping they'd get it, and in large part, I think that's what we do with teaching. I think I would benefit from zooming out my focus to get a look at the bigger picture of teaching in one scene and my/our collective impact on that scene. It's just difficult to see circumstances in a new way when you exist within them.

So after this portion of the journey, my question is this: What is following? What IS it? Perhaps more specifically, what are the characteristics of the mental state of following and how do they influence the body? How do we focus on willingness, readiness so that they become a central part of us?