two ways of improving

I’ve noticed, roughly speaking, two very different set of circumstances for improvement.

In one you sort of know and/or feel what the next step is. When you’re practicing a new move or body position in tango, for instance, even though you can’t do it properly yet,  you still know and see what you’re supposed to do and you go through the sensation of what it’s like when you manage to occasionally do it right. Then you “merely” have to practice until it becomes a natural part of you. In any case, you can more or less successfully intuit what you’re supposed to be striving towards and how well you’re doing it.

The other sort of improvement is when you’re aiming for something that is so far out of your reach, you have no idea how you’re supposed to be striving towards it (if you’re aware of what it is at all). You simply don’t have the necessary level of feeling in you to sense what the next step is. What should you do in that case?

Lately, I’m starting to believe more and more strongly that the way to reach what you can’t really grasp is to follow concrete steps – exercises and guidelines in behavior – that will bring you to your goal. It’s the “Miyagi style” of improvement, though with an added explanation of why you’re doing the seemingly pointless thing.

Actually, it would be better to say that it’s not pointless, but counterintuitive. You have to force yourself to behave in a certain way which is foreign to you in order to grasp what it feels like to behave like that. I have a big problem with saying no, for instance, especially when it comes to turning down someone who’s asking you for a favor or is offering you an interesting opportunity. Because in that moment of decision I cannot feel that what matters to me is more important than the thing dangling in front of me and it will suffer if I don’t turn down the offer, I have to literally go against my nature. I have to force myself to say no, all the time being aware that saying it will feel awkward and “wrong”. But it’s the only way of not only staying focused now, but learning how to do the same more naturally tomorrow.

I’ve only just begin to think about  these two sets of circumstances, but I feel like grasping them more deeply will give me a lot. So, do I feel them out or get to them counterintuitively?

sudden progress

Today we went to a concert of Gotan Project here in Belgrade. I haven’t heard the new album and didn’t know what to expect, but we had a blast – one tanguera organized a special space for all of us for dancing, and so we swayed excitedly to the sound of Gotan. So, I was very inspired, but I noticed something more in my dance: A feeling of improvement.

It’s one of those feelings when you suddenly realize that you can feel the embrace more deeply, or you move a lot more easily or something else entirely. These moments are becoming more and more rare, but at the time when you’re about to start missing and looking  forward to them, you also find out that where you are right now is quite nice and enjoyable too. Still, they’re as wonderful to feel as ever when they do appear out of the blue.

What I’ve noticed is that tango is possibly the only place where I simply know those moments will occasionally happen. I dance for pleasure and I practice in class, and so they’re an logical and inevitable occurrence. On the other hand, at the same time I can’t think of anything else in which I’ve had this feeling lately. I’m very capable in activism, but who knows how much better I can be – I am yet to systematically practice what I preach. My Japanese is deteriorating and I really want to (and need to, due to my final exam) work on it. I started and loved doing kick-boxing, but after the summer break I got sick and two months later I’m still not cured enough to be certain I can do intense exercise.

Forgetting my current circumstances for a moment, I can’t really remember the last time I made such visible progress in something. Perhaps in Japanese, a year or two ago, but I didn’t get anywhere near the point where you’re confident in using the knowledge you have, even if perhaps you’re still not at an intermediate level.

This is bad, because that feeling – the sudden awareness of progress – is evidence of your focus on a certain thing, which I think is one of the most important parts of a human being. Yet, while there seems to be no reason to avoid focused work which can bring you so much joy, somehow right now I manage doing it only in tango. Why?

to be continued

 

unpredictable change – learning vals

While I started dancing milonga pretty much by accident, with vals it was a different story. I wasn’t afraid of dancing it – I just didn’t get it. There would be a few songs that I liked, but in general they all sounded similar and, well, uninspiring. I couldn’t connect to them in any way – until about two months ago, when suddenly I  could.

They just started to make sense. I could feel the emotion in them, the way they build their energy like a grand spiral, a swooping continuous pulsation, not stopping until the last beat. I loved it.

What I find amazing is how sudden and unforeseeable this change was. Like learning a language, one day a certain sentence is meaningless and the next it just makes sense. Our problem, I would say, is that I think we often forget this – just because a change isn’t clearly visible as some continuous, gradual improvement, it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening.

What we should remember, then, is that if we are putting in the hours, doing the right things and being present while we do so, change will happen. We might not be able to predict when, mostly we have no idea what our work will bring in the future and sometimes we’re also not sure if what we’re doing will produce results at all. But that’s the beauty of it, wouldn’t you say?

 

improving, one step at a time

In the past few days I’ve felt a noticeable improvement in my general level of dance. Some moves have suddenly become easier to do, some also changing slightly in the process. I feel more confident in my ability to express myself through my movement, I sense a deeper connection with the tangueras in the embrace, and I feel that itch to find new ways of expressing myself. So, it’s like an overall tango level-up.

This in no way means that I see tango as some sort of video game. On the contrary, while I think that focused improvement is something great and much needed, at the same time I think that improvement should also be a very organic process, guided as much (if not more) by awareness and feeling as by planning and thinking.

While I’ve reached a point where I could add a lot of moves to my dance and quickly be able to do them at a more-or-less satisfactory level technically, I’ve realized that this is not necessarily a good thing. A move that you can do technically well is, to me, useless if you do it simply like a move, and not something that is an expression of yourself, inspired by and in tune with the music and your partner.

I remember when at one practica I was dancing with a tanguera who is very confident and free in her movement, so experimenting and trying out new moves with her is great. At one point I started doing the kick and trying to do it as often and from as many positions I could (sort of like Naveira at 1:00-1:10. Is that what the move is called?). I was surprised and happy to find out that I could do them with much more confidence and precision than I expected (actually I didn’t really expect to be able to do them at all). I also experimented with some cool sacadas and some other moves and I felt that rush of “discovering” new moves on your own.

Later at the milongas I tried implementing the moves in my dance. It didn’t really work. I would do the move, but I wouldn’t “feel” it. It would be visibly out of sync with the rest of my dance, instead of flowing out of the moment and the previous movement. So, pretty soon I stopped trying to do them.

Maybe I needed to be more persistent with some of them. However, I think it simply didn’t feel like the right time to integrate these moves in my dance. It seems to me that there almost needs to be a sort of hunger or desire from your body to express itself in more ways than it currently can, and that desire finds its release in the right new move.That move might have been the one you first learned just two days ago, but it could also be something from half a year ago, or it could come seemingly out of nowhere.

I guess that when you want to improve some part of yourself, your being has to not only want it, but also be ready for it. You can’t force or trick yourself into skipping two steps ahead if right now you’re only capable of barely reaching the one step in front of you. At the same time, we are often hesitant to make that one step, even when we can make it.

For that one step, you need to be brave. Our teachers speak often of this bravery in our classes, and I agree. I also think that what will make you braver is the realization that any mistakes you make while you’re reach out for that one step are nothing but momentary stumbles – barely (if at all) uncomfortable and quickly forgotten. Yet the rewards are bountiful.