I don’t dance, not in any formal sense. Started to get lessons once (when I was 7 more or less) and then we moved again, and never got back to it.
Adrian to Rocky: “Why do you want to be a fighter?”
Rocky to Adrian: “Because I can’t sing or dance.”
At parties when people would insist that I get up and “dance” the perennial advice was always something like “don’t think about it, just let the music carry you.”
Yeah… right. That never really worked that well. I’ll let your imagination fill in the details.
However, when I crossed the boundary zone on a particular decade of my life I began to deliberately practice some “dancing.” Something sort of like tap, maybe clogging. Beats me what it is. But as time went by, using this every day as a thing I do while waiting for the tea water to heat, or 10 – 15 minutes of cadio-excercise a few times each day, etc, as the months went by I not only developed back some of the musculature that used to be “normal” to my calves and feet, I also began to spontaneously come up with “new” dance steps, thoughts of the moment expressed by my feet(1).
After about 2 years of such mostly-daily play and practice and using “dance” as exercise it has finally become rather natural and easy to dance out a response to some feeling, some bit of music in a movie (as I wander from the kitchen back to the library room, say) or just because I feel like it.
Now I actually can “let the music take me,” and it works. After a fashion, at least.
Short version: advice like “just let the music take you” didn’t work for me until I’d had some practice moving my feet in that way, developed some patterns and ability with the muscles and maybe a kinesthetic sense of what it all feels like, too.
In other words, for me, to “let the music carry me” required that I had already built a repertoire of moves by which the music could carry me. Even new moves inspired by the music are based on known movements that have been practiced over and over.
Perhaps it’s not that way for everyone, but it most certainly was for me, and I have to say, to be fair, I’m not uncoordinated and never have been, and I’ve always moved with more than a little grace. Still, I needed about 2 years of constant practice to get any good at it. I hope to get much better yet, but it’s now at a place where it’s fun and even expressive.
All self trained, of course. It might not have taken that long if I’d actually taken lessons. 🙂
My point? Be careful of what you say to people along the lines of “oh it’s easy! Just let go!” Such well meaning, so-called encouragements(2) managed to convince me for many years that there was no point in my trying to dance(3). Maybe it works for some people… in my case, it was only my own natural hard-headedness that eventually (four decades later!) led me back to trying again and finally succeeding, on my own terms, in my own way. It was simply never something I was going to learn in an evening at some party.
Again… be very careful with the judgements / encouragements you hand out to those around you. You have no idea how much damage even a well-intended remark might do.
Especially watch what judgements, encouragements, discouragements you give yourself! Those are the most potent and the most powerful, good or bad. We hear someone else’s judgement, we agree with it or we don’t, in agreeing with it, it gains power. Our own judgments, though, can go straight to the heart.
Just be gentle with yourself. It works much better.
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(1) I also use this as a left-right brain balance exercise. When I “invent” (or discover or notice) a new step I then immediately work to duplicate it “in the mirror” so to speak, lead with the other foot, turn it around, whatever. Sometimes it’s simple; more often it takes a serious effort to go the other way, no matter on which “hand” the step first appeared. Left-right brain balance is one of the constant regimens and practices I use to maintain brain and neurological health. Just my thing.
(2) There is a serious difference between a true encouragement and back-handed encouragement. Before you say something (if you can catch yourself in time, otherwise after you say it) ask yourself why am I saying this? What’s the real reason? Like with my dancing it might take years of practice at looking deeply into your self, it might especially take a lot of patience and persistence to get down to the real why, your real motivation. Once you get there, though, you can be sure of delivering a true encouragement… or not, as you see fit.
(3) I’ve recently completed a similar experience [still completing, truly] around singing. Early “encouragement” convinced me to just keep my mouth shut instead of trying to sing along. But recently, by putting some serious intention on it, listening as intently and deeply as possible to my own voice (which is not easy), I have managed after a fashion to sing well enough now to risk it in social contexts when appropriate and no longer worry overly much what it sounds like. Took a long time to unlearn the early discouragements, to notice what “tone deaf” people actually sound like and notice it was in no way related to myself, to figure out where my natural register for singing is (not that closely related to my speaking register, which was part of the problem), and so on. There’s nothing any of us can not do, if we just give up the “reasons why not” — though discovering the reasons why not can be an enormous challenge at times.