Monday, December 10, 2012

Highly Questionable

I'd like to preface everything by pronouncing this blog and the contents herein, in the words of my partner, "highly questionable." Why? Because this same pronouncement is made about our dancing, by that same young gentleman, roughly five times a day. Nevertheless, I'd ask you to consider whether this is not the best attitude to have about one's dancing, and in fact, about life in general.

Think about it this way. The moment to we stop questioning ourselves and asking why, the moment that we take our own abilities for granted, that is the moment when we stop growing. To make any sort of progress, in one's dancing or in any pursuit, requires a certain humility and a consciousness of one's own limitations, and tireless inquest into the reasons why things are the way they are, and why my dancing doesn't look like it should, or feel like it should, or move like it should.

So I think that, all things considered, Brandon and I are on the same page here. (Pun so not intentional.) We know roughly where we are with our dancing, and we know, perhaps more clearly, where we want to be. And for us, those two items are matching up relatively well between us these days. Both being of introspective natures, we found that a lot of our dance training has spilled over into hours of mental reflection, some in depth conversations, and personal study, as we try to determine what exactly it will take for us to achieve these goals of ours, both together as a partnership and individually as dancers.

I'd like to make a comment about the subtitle of this blog. It came to me rather suddenly as a random and silly idea as Brandon and I were attempting to christen it. I explained to Brandon that I have always felt like the world in general is just too clunky. Mostly it's people: people when they dance, people in their interactions, people in their movement. There is so much good and beauty in this world, and if there was just some way for us to tread more lightly, rather than to stomp through this life, how much more of that beauty we would see. I suppose I ought to give specific examples to illustrate this rather outlandish assessment, but I just don't think I have any top of mind, unless it is ladies in clunky heels making as much noise as possible in a quite church on a stone floor. In any case, we'd like to think that this idea applies to our quest to become better dancers. We've noticed a sad lack in the rank and file of competitive dancers of a true expression of what dancing is all about. The two bodies moving as one, flowing across the floor to the strains of beautiful music, creating harmonious lines and shapes and a unified picture, something about this ideal is so often just not there. Many dancers seem too focused on "getting marked" to care whether their dancing is graceful and really beautiful. And although Brandon and I are both pretty competitive ourselves, for us competition is kind of a means to an end, the end being real, beautiful and powerful dancing.

Our goal, with our dancing and with this blog, is to try to bring back some of the beauty and grace that has lost it's rightful place in ballroom dancing. Highly questionable? I think so. Let's just say we have our work more than cut out for us.

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