Separate classes?






Unknown said...

Polly wanna Tango?

You'd be learning to parrot. A teacher once told me that dancing Tango is the giving and receiving of signals between two listening parties.

Patterns have the potential to harm the brain's natural ability to respond to changes in music and movement.

Polly don't want that ;)

msHedgehog said...

My approach has been to mostly not quite listen in class. You always have two or three things you're personally working on to improve your dance, and you work on those regardless of the class content. You ignore all of the stuff that's about the pattern, but you tune in to the bits about technique, and if anything interesting comes up you put aside what you were working on and work on the new thing, and add it to your list for later. Then you treat the class as a practice session, rotate as much as possible, and follow whatever actually gets led. And also: don't talk. Never try to fix other people's problems - always say you're not-sure-let's-try-it-again, then flag down the teacher and ask. A bonus is that all this makes you a really popular follower in class with the leaders who genuinely want to be good, which helps for the social dancing.

Maybe not the ideal answer but it kind of works.

Mari said...

msHedgehog - What fantastic advice. I'm going to forward that along actually, as this subject comes up a lot when I talk with other followers. We talked about getting a sort of selective amnesia during (and after) classes. I imagine you must have quite a queue waiting to dance with you! :)

Pete - you're so right - Polly don't want that lol.