Boh. It's been a while since I've last updated, but anyone that is friends with me knows that my spare time is usually at a premium, so I'm not going to bother getting into what has been keeping me so busy lately - the answer is about fifty different things, and I wish I had enough time to add about fifty more.
I'm going to get straight into the meat of what I want to write about tonight: The foundations of movement. My focus has been on playing Magic and dancing lately. Squash, I'm still playing a lot, but mentally, my thoughts are revolving around those two other things.
I was thinking about movement in general today, and realized that I've never really taken the time to articulate my philosophy when it comes to dancing. Every good dancer has a philosophy in how they approach the styles that they like. Some people I know improve by drawing out the steps of a move that they want to learn, while others just visualize it in there head and then start trying to replicate the movement.
I've always been very technical in the way I learn, and that, for me, means breaking down a move into it's most constituent parts, learning each of those parts, then putting them together. I've found, as I've progressed and developed, that if I learn the parts of a technique very well, putting them together usually comes to me fairly naturally, and the finished product looks very polished. Some people don't find this useful at all, but by learning this way, I learn each basic part of the movement, and from that, I have an understanding of how each movement leads into or follows from the next movement, and how they fit together.
This is starting to get a pretty technical space - I'm talking about breaking down a wave up the arm into each of the individual isolations, and then thinking about the bend at the wrist, and how that follows to the bend at the elbow. I like to practice back and forth from wrist to elbow, then back to wrist, and so on. In doing so, I get a total understanding of how these two movements tie into each other, and can repeat the motion when I'm doing a wave in either direction. Yes - some people can learn faster by just knowing that those are two of the isolations they need to include, and from there going straight to practicing the wave up and down their arm. However, I think that learning this way guarantees the greatest level of understanding about the way that your body moves, and leads to the most complete level of mastery for a given technique.
This leads into what I consider the most fundamental part of how I dance, and how I approach dancing - foundations of movement. In general, I don't bother coming up with choreography. What that means is that you won't usually see me doing fancy moves that I've sat down and thought up, then practiced until things look good. I find this boring, and while it definitely looks awesome seeing a really good dancer do a move that I never would have thought of, I'm just not wired for this kind of learning, and I never manage to retain an interest for this type of dancing.
Like I said, I'm all about the foundations of movement. What are foundations of movement? What does this philosophy mean exactly? It means that I believe in learning fundamental types of movement, which serve as the building blocks from which I create my own style of dance. I don't think it's necessary that someone learn how to specifically wave from one hand to the other, then bring it up around their head, out through their mouth, then back in the mouth and down the feet. Let's say I wanted to do this - this is how I would approach it:
- Learn how to wave from my hand up to my shoulder and back down, on each side.
- Learn how to wave from my hand up to my shoulder, across my chest, then back down to the other arm. Then do the same in the other direction.
- Learn how to do a wave from my head, down to my feet, then back up.
Once I've got these fundamentals down pat, I have all of the building blocks necessary to perform the fancy choreographed move that I've described above - If I've learned correctly how to do each of those three types of wave, I should be able to apply those same techniques to wave through my arm up to my head, and likewise, do a similar wave out of my mouth (as an example to anyone that is taking notes, it would be enough to turn your head to the side, putting your chin near your shoulder, open your mouth, then wave from your shoulder down your arm to your hand).
There are numerous benefits to learning this way, as I see it:
- You understand the movement completely
- You can adapt this movement to many different moves
- Understanding the individual parts of a given move will make it much easier for you to combine different foundations.
By actually breaking a movement down into its atomic parts, you have the most complete understanding of the way the movement works possible. If you have done this, you'll be able to tell quickly, looking in the mirror, when you're missing an important isolation on a new wave you're working on.
By learning the basic foundations of a given technique this way, you are able to then take those building blocks and use them for new moves. Let's take an arm wave for example. If you learned by studying the isolations involved in an arm wave, and practiced them just doing a standard arm wave (starting with your arm wave straight out at your side, wave up the hand to the shoulder, then back down again). It's a simple matter from this starting point to use these same isolations with your arm starting straight up above your head, or bring the wave down your shoulder through your arm, moving your arm across in front of your chest.
When I first started learning to pop, I found it very frustrating trying to connect the different pieces of foundation that I was learning. I couldn't manage to get my arm waves to connect properly with my body waves, or, even more difficult, get my arm waves to connect properly with my twist-o-flex. Rather than spend time practicing bringing the two together, I put more effort into making sure that I understood how to do each of these moves correctly. Again, these are the foundations. Over time, it became more and more easy to connect these moves, as well as other moves that I had been practicing. The reason is that I grew to understand how the different types of waves finished, and how I could connect that finish to the other moves I was trying to make work.
As an example, a standard arm wave generally ends at or around the shoulder. The better I got at making sure my shoulder isolated properly made it easier to start connecting that arm wave. Next, I learned the isolations of a body wave as best as possible. The body wave often starts at the head, then hits the shoulders, then travels down the chest and to the legs. The key here was to connect the arm wave's end at the shoulders with that portion of the body wave. The end result is a wave that travels up my arms, hits my shoulders, and from there begins the rest of the standard body wave downwards.
These are all variations on the same theme - learning the fundamentals as best as possible, then letting the music tell you how you should put them together. I think that when you start to learn things this way, it opens up whole new dimensions in how you are able to improvise. If you've learned how to isolate heel pivots really well for one type of move that you were practicing, you'll suddenly find yourself using that same heel pivot in the middle of another move that you're working on. These kind of things will just start to happen, the more broader your base of fundamentals grows.
So, I guess to end on, I'm writing this post for the me of 9 years ago when I first started dancing, and to anyone else that finds themselves in the same position. Practice the fundamentals (and in the urban dance community, no phrase is repeated more often than "learn the foundation first") and don't get discouraged feeling that they aren't going to come together and lead to an overall dance style that you can call your own - it will take time, but it will happen, and it's awesome every time it does.
