Week 5 ~ the learning & teaching of dance (prt.2)

After some reflection on our Beat Initiative visit, talks soon turned to the Calypso phenomenon which emerged out of the Trinidadian pre-Lenten Carnival. Unfortunately I have been unable to locate J.Skinner's paper which deals with his own experiences of Calypso and Carnival as performed in Trinidad. However, he provided a quick overview in lecture on Monday and gave us a good idea of the salient features.
In all Carnival celebrations there is an element of inversion of socially accepted (and expected) behaviour; there's an element of parody, of grotesqueness, of exaggeration, of excess - all of which leads Max Gluckman to introduce the idea that there is perhaps a "license in ritual"; does ritual performance permit us to act outside the bounds of everyday behaviour? is there perhaps even an expectation to act differently within the ritual idiom? This would fit in with the whole idea of the safety-valve theory which argues that Carnival acts as a 'safety-valve' within society, it allows for the breaking of social codes of behaviour and 'rules' so that the rest of the year people can adhere to society's confines without the need to rebel.

This idea of 'license in ritual' leads on to the ritual of dancing. Do we perceive dancing as a ritual performance? If so only within the context of the performance space is this license to act 'differently' granted. This can be seen in J.Skinner's article 'At the busk and after dusk' [2003] where the ceroc team decide to 'busk' on a Saturday afternoon out on the street - a time and place very different from the usual place where their dancing takes place. This request to dance outside the usual performance space brought difficulty for several of the group's members who thought it wrong to dance at this time and place; they had set upon themselves a set of rules in which they only permitted themselves to dance (thus act differently) in the usual performance time and space (thus the ritual context) - here the 'license' provided by 'ritual' is greatly exemplified.

Soon the discussion was led to the aspect of embodiment and the question of its significance or importance in the learning process. Nigel Rapport's field work experience, after finding that his theoretical insight were most often preceded by some form if physical involvement, led him to belief that movement could be the "mother of cognition", and that perhaps our movements influence the way, or even what, we think. The significance of learning through embodiment in dance has already been discussed previously and thus I will take it as given for now.
Thus the teaching of dance, as I have experienced it here in Belfast, in Manchester, and in Spain all call upon embodiment to pass on the knowledge of dance movements - muscle memory instilled by means of mimicry is most often utilised, as is the cerebral memory through the use of vocalising the movements; in tandem these two techniques seem to be quite effective.
J Skinner, in his article 'Think like a duck: become the duck' [undated] points us to the use of metaphor in the teaching of dance movements. The use of imagery and metaphor may be very effective in order to explain a certain body motion, however it is only effective if all present understand and are able to visualise the metaphor invoked. If a student is from a different social or cultural background the images/metaphors used may not be helpful at all, but rather lead to the exclusion of this student. Thus metaphor is only useful if all those being taught share the teacher's understanding of it.

The session was ended with a short questionnaire concerning our own experiences of learning to dance. I must say I have never enjoyed these sort of questions which require you to actually express what it is you feel about a certain experience - as with the ethnography of dance (or music for that matter) it is extremely difficult to express in writing something which is experienced in and with the body. However it did give me food for thought, and made me more aware of the teaching methods employed in the next Salsa class. [An interesting aspect which emerged out of the questionnaire was that the personality of the instructor was of utmost importance - something which I was perhaps not expecting, but once I thought about it it actually did ring true to my own experiences also].

We have a breakthrough! The Wednesday salsa class could be argued to have been one of the most successful classes yet, and this was due to the fact that we were finally 'dancing'. After another step was added to our repertoire, namely enchufla [followers (as per usual starting with the right foot: back, forward (veering towards left), side, side (whilst pivoting anticlockwise 90 degrees), cross forward, together] which then leads on into the dile que no, something along the lines of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Jb8LRMPMfs (I'm not sure about the guy's arm movement at the start - I'm all for being enthusiastic but this is a bit much;)).
Practicing this took up most of the class, however it was worth it - after several rounds and several tempos there seemed to be a shift in the movement of some of the class members' movements, and as the instructor said "now it's starting to feel like dancing" - there seemed to emerge a certain fluidity in the movement which had priorly been some what disjunct. People seemed to be embodying their acquired knowledge rather than actively thinking of each step.

I had another dancing experience I encountered this week was that of a Brazilian Bumba Boi (or Boi meu Bumba) which is an altogether different experience - the dance steps are not intricate, rather they seem an elaborated version of three steps forward, pause, three steps back; however, I had great difficulty with getting my body to move in the way required, it required a certainty, legs in quite a wide stance, body sort of bent down, and in bear feet - the flat of the foot being used to tap the fourth beat (pause). Focus is on the legs rather than on hips (which should have already signalled to me i'd find it difficult. An interesting experience, requiring me to step out of my comfort zone were I to fully participate in the dance.