Hey, y'all... welcome to my new blog. To kick things off, I'm going to repost an essay that I wrote this summer (July 2011), after I attended Stompology in Rochester, NY. "Repost," because this essay originally appear on my friends' blog, All the Cats Join In.
I am planning on posting a ULHS trip report soon! but I decided that it would be the impetus for just setting up a blog already, and I wanted to put this out there, since it's something I've very glad I wrote, and benefit from rereading and reminding myself of, occasionally.
I am planning on posting a ULHS trip report soon! but I decided that it would be the impetus for just setting up a blog already, and I wanted to put this out there, since it's something I've very glad I wrote, and benefit from rereading and reminding myself of, occasionally.
My greatest flaw as a dancer is probably my tendency to let my social anxiety strangle me.
My fear of screwing up on the dance floor manifests in frequent "thinking face" when I'm being led, even by familiar leads, through new or complex patterns, and in my tendency to choke when I ask a ‘high-status’ leader for a dance. My favorite definition of "choke" is from the book Deep Survival: a reversion to the state of being a beginner, wherein you consciously think about what you're doing, as opposed to the more advanced state of performance where "muscle memory" largely controls the specifics of movement. To choke is to lose one's flow. The mechanics of this for me personally usually looks like bad posture and too much tension in my arms and body, which hinders my ability to follow sensitively. In either case, the process is too much thinking and the product is less than sublime dancing.
Which is a shame, because my favorite part of dancing, the high that I am always chasing that keeps me coming back, is found in the moments when I am not in my head but in my body, fully with the music and my partner. There is a thrilling physicality to just letting go and dancing.
