Went to the Culture Club and danced for a night, and found myself reflecting on this conversation. :)
I was more intrigued by a different angle of this thread though; something which reminded me of Yukio Mishima’s "Forbidden Colors", wherein a gay man marries a woman who thinks he’s straight in order to have children and make his mother happy. The description of the newlywed couple in bed is that there were actually four people in bed -- the actual man, the actual woman, the straight man the woman imagines she’s with, and the imaginary man that the gay man must think of in order to excite himself.
To me the perception of ballroom dance is based on the misperception that the construct which the money grubbing schools and what you call "those rational types" have created.
To me, dance is many things: at the core, there is what I think of as the heart and soul of dance. This is the different communications between many entities. There is the communication between the inner being (the thoughts and emotions) of the dancer with the outer being (the body). There is the communication between the (integrated) dancer and space. There is the communication between the dancer and the music, and perhaps one step further away, there is the communication between the dancer and anyone who might be watching. All are a part of the dance, though the last is optional.
In partner dancing there is a further communication between the partners, who cooperate to create a piece of artwork through the conversation that happens between their integrated beings that neither of them would be able to create on their own. I think the closest parallel would be the Jazz or Blues musicians who jam to create a piece that, while it has elements of what they have studied in the past, is unique each time, and even if they play the same song twice, it would be wildly different.
The dance schools, beginning with Arthur Murray Studios, took the original structure which the ISTD created as a teaching tool and made it into a more rigid structure because that way, it becomes far simpler to cut up the structure into modules, which makes it easier to teach and to learn to teach, i.e. even a lousy teacher can teach dance the Arthur Murray way "by the book", showing supposed progress by moving up through the program. This is not a problem if one understands what structure represents, but results in a perversion of that original intent if a person takes the program as an end in and of itself.
This complicates the situation: while the professionals who created this kind of program probably understood what the structure was all about, their students may not have. From there comes another two entities, the construct itself, and the misperception that the construct is all.
Stepping yet further out, there are those who are outside of the structured ballroom dance circles. They don’t even really see the construct structure itself, having not studied ballroom, but the misperceptions about the structure by people who don’t necessarily understand the structure. Some, especially free-thinking creative types, have a tendency to abhore such attitudes as was created around the structure.
So, you have creative people, who might otherwise have really enjoyed ballroom dance, being repulsed by it because of the misperception of a misperception; the belief that what they have seen, which is the perversion of the initial purpose of the structure created to preserve and teach a form of art, is what ballroom dance is about.
I find this a terribly sad thing.
Anyway, no arguments from me about the unlearning.
A Random Comment from October 5, 2002
Went to the Culture Club and danced for a night, and found myself reflecting on this conversation. :)
I was more intrigued by a different angle of this thread though; something which reminded me of Yukio Mishima’s "Forbidden Colors", wherein a gay man marries a woman who thinks he’s straight in order to have children and make his mother happy. The description of the newlywed couple in bed is that there were actually four people in bed -- the actual man, the actual woman, the straight man the woman imagines she’s with, and the imaginary man that the gay man must think of in order to excite himself.
To me the perception of ballroom dance is based on the misperception that the construct which the money grubbing schools and what you call "those rational types" have created.
To me, dance is many things: at the core, there is what I think of as the heart and soul of dance. This is the different communications between many entities. There is the communication between the inner being (the thoughts and emotions) of the dancer with the outer being (the body). There is the communication between the (integrated) dancer and space. There is the communication between the dancer and the music, and perhaps one step further away, there is the communication between the dancer and anyone who might be watching. All are a part of the dance, though the last is optional.
In partner dancing there is a further communication between the partners, who cooperate to create a piece of artwork through the conversation that happens between their integrated beings that neither of them would be able to create on their own. I think the closest parallel would be the Jazz or Blues musicians who jam to create a piece that, while it has elements of what they have studied in the past, is unique each time, and even if they play the same song twice, it would be wildly different.
The dance schools, beginning with Arthur Murray Studios, took the original structure which the ISTD created as a teaching tool and made it into a more rigid structure because that way, it becomes far simpler to cut up the structure into modules, which makes it easier to teach and to learn to teach, i.e. even a lousy teacher can teach dance the Arthur Murray way "by the book", showing supposed progress by moving up through the program. This is not a problem if one understands what structure represents, but results in a perversion of that original intent if a person takes the program as an end in and of itself.
This complicates the situation: while the professionals who created this kind of program probably understood what the structure was all about, their students may not have. From there comes another two entities, the construct itself, and the misperception that the construct is all.
Stepping yet further out, there are those who are outside of the structured ballroom dance circles. They don’t even really see the construct structure itself, having not studied ballroom, but the misperceptions about the structure by people who don’t necessarily understand the structure. Some, especially free-thinking creative types, have a tendency to abhore such attitudes as was created around the structure.
So, you have creative people, who might otherwise have really enjoyed ballroom dance, being repulsed by it because of the misperception of a misperception; the belief that what they have seen, which is the perversion of the initial purpose of the structure created to preserve and teach a form of art, is what ballroom dance is about.
I find this a terribly sad thing.
Anyway, no arguments from me about the unlearning.