All posts by John White

I first saw a date of mine dancing Lindy Hop in February 2007. I thought, "If I'm going to keep dating her, I'd better start taking some lessons!" The relationship didn't last, but the dancing did. Actually, so did the lessons.
practice

Taylor Hatala Admiration Not Envy

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Not sure where in my social network this video of Laurence Kaiwai’s choreography to Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda came from, but thank you friend. Apparently that’s 11-year-old Taylor Hatala front and center at the end of a choreo class, just crushing it. I have Taylor Hatala admiration, not envy, I swear.

Which of course sent me down a rabbit hole of Taylor Hatala hip-hop dance videos.

Ricki Cole’s choreo
“Act Out” by Audio Push

Taylor Hatala admiration!

Matt Steffanina’s Choreo
“Problem” by Ariana Grande

Taylor Hatala admiration!

David Moore’s choreo
“I Don’t Know” by Meek Mill
Make sure you watch past the credits, there’s two post-class choreo performances there, one to Chris Brown’s “Down.”


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Taylor Hatala admiration!

I was chaining these performances (and more; The list just goes on) and trying to figure out what I was feeling. Envy that this young girl had the opportunity to have gone through so much hard work at such a young age? No, maybe that it was in something so immediately applicable in life. My 200 yd butterfly skills haven’t come up recently. But wait, dance happens to be something I appreciate at this point in my life, but just 8 short years ago (When Taylor Hatala was 3!), I definitely wouldn’t have thought of dance as something “immediately applicable in life.” In fact, I’m not even sure that phrase is really true about dance.

It’s admiration. Really. She’d definitely worked harder than I at dance over the past 8 years, and it shows. It’s awesome to see the results. She’s got space to improve too, watch pro Sophia Aguiar do the routine to “Down.”

Oh, you want a non-staged, no cut, classroom version? Once at the top, and again at 2:40.

Clean, right? The isolations are just amazing. And of course it’s not a fair comparison. I’m really struggling with this. It’s not fair to project a career, practice, or skill development onto an 11-year-old. I hope she’s having as much fun as it looks, and that it stays fun.

Ten-thousand hours of Deep Practice
Master Coaching
Ignition

I’ll be keeping an eye out for further videos and inspiration.

Oh, Lindy Hop content? How about that killer scoot at 30s of the last video? Reminds me of the scoot styling that Stefan Durham did in this J&J. Especially at the beginning. But also that tremendous scoot at 1:16, even though it doesn’t have the windup on the same plane. Unrelated: Jo Hoffberg is still amazing.

http://youtu.be/CZEoSg_idBI

Lead and Follow

Lead and Follow Without Sound

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I had a really interesting experience last night, dancing with a deaf follow. I didn’t realize it right away, but she didn’t respond when I offered my name or respond to my conversation at all. And then I realized in open position, she was getting ahead of the beat. Financial setback One of the main reasons why romantic partnerships never order cialis online get off the ground is because of money, or lack thereof. Moreover even if you managed to get an idea discount viagra usa about the popularity of the company. You can take your sweet time to enjoy the combined diverting of bingo again dinosaurs, especially the buy viagra conspicuous fervor of shouting “Terrible Lizard!” as the winning shout. It means that the body is well hydrated, the circulatory system cheapest tadalafil india perfect. I experimented a bit with loosening and firming my left-to-right connection but wasn’t able to transmit the beat to her as effectively as when we were in closed and I could use my right hand and forearm (I suppose I don’t actually have any idea what her level of hearing loss actually is, or how well she could feel the beat in open; I just know when she was on and off the beat).

I’d like to experiment in the future with lead and follow classes where the lead hears the music through earbuds while the follow has ear plugs. How effective do you think you’d be at staying on beat with these limitations?

advanced beginner, advice

Men Following

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vernacular jazz dance.

I’ll always remember Jo telling us girls that learning to lead would improve our dancing, but noone ever told the men that learning to follow might just expand their horizon as well. 

I don’t mind saying it again.  One of the most important classes I took during my novice/advanced-beginner phase of learning was a beginner series as a follow.  I remember the epiphany I had, “I have no idea what this guy wants me to do now.  I wonder if my follows feel that way when they’re dancing with me?  I’ll make sure that never happens!”
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That led to a phase of over-leading, but I eventually dialed it back to something clear without being exaggerated.

learning process

There’s No Progress Without Challenge

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For the past seven months or so, I’ve been faced with a new challenge in Lindy Hop: very slow progress on something I’m focusing on (aerials).  Not progressing the fastest among my peers.  For the past few years of my dancing, that’s been really uncommon.  Maybe I’ve been prideful about it?  No maybe’s about it.  I’ve taken great satisfaction in it.  I’ve been a high achiever.  No so much with this work.  It’s been slow, grinding progress.  Extremely slow.  Sometimes it feels like two steps back, one step forward.

And yet, throughout this time, I’ve been able to keep from getting frustrated by focusing on my process.  Watching a lot of other people’s progress.  Trying to understand what was making successful people successful.  Trying to get a lot of feedback from expert coaches.  Trying to get feedback from my partners and peers.  Accepting and trying to internalize suggestions and critiques.  Trying to get video of myself for self-critique.  Keeping my goals in mind.  Remembering other challenges that I’ve met and overcome, and how that’s worked in my favor.  My emotional state hasn’t been perfectly serene the whole time, as I’ve definitely had my valleys, but it hasn’t ever been … bad.

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How do you deal with learning something that you have a high desire to do, but make much slower progress at than you’re used to making?

mental models

Musicality and Creativity Are Best Buddies

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I just finished re-reading Rebecca Brightly’s post, Musicality Is Overrated, started to respond with a comment, and decided to write a post instead.  I recently wrote a bit about what I mean when I discuss musicality in Musicality: Macro and Micro, so my thoughts on the issue are fresh.

Responses

I think there are some strong comment responses because of the strong oppositional statements against musicality (“sucks”) and driving toward a new paradigm of creativity.

I don’t quite agree with the premises:

Ambiguity of Definition

I think this is easily combatted by thought, discussion, and definition of personal terms.  I mentioned how I use micro- and macro-musicality, but I could have used rhythmic- and expressive-musicality (Darn, those might be better terms since they imply their definitions).

Is it a problem that other people have different definitions for the same or similar phrases?  Not as long as we all know each others’ definitions.  What I think of as macro-musicality seems to closely align with Rebecca’s expression of creativity.  I think it might come close to a linguistic difference.

Impossibility of Teaching

I’ve used the exact same creativity exercise referenced in the original post, packaged as a musicality exercise.  I’ve gone through the process of walking through different variations and points in music where rhythm changes match up to the variation.  It doesn’t feel that difficult to me.  It does require more time, effort, and students ready to be receptive to the ideas (learning where best to apply existing knowledge as opposed to learning new material doesn’t feel like a good value to some people).

Intuitively Difficult to Understand

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Doesn’t Go Far Enough

I think this flows from a lack of definitions but might also come from a mental model of musicality that is limiting rather than embracing of new things.

Best Buddies

If, to this point, I sound like I don’t like what Rebecca Brightly wrote, I apologize.  I think I disagree with the framing, but we probably think about musicality differently and have different existing paradigms in our heads, which lead to different expression of ideas (Actually, that’s a great parallel for expressiveness in dancing).

Overlap

Ultimately, I think that musicality and creativity go hand in hand.  If Rebecca Brightly says “creative expression” and I say “musical expression” and we mean about the same thing, is that so terrible?  I don’t think so.  Do I think it has to mean the exact same thing?  Probably not.  Creativity could cover a large number of meanings, as could musicality.  There could be musical parts of dancing that minimize creativity and creative things which aren’t musical.  So no, there isn’t 100% overlap.  At the end of the day, when I read about this phrase “creative vision” as applied to Lindy Hop, I think to myself, “Those are my words for an aspect of musicality.”

Process

It’s apparent that another source of stimulation for Rebecca Brightly is the presence of sources for stimulating the creative process.  I really love this too, and am checking out a number of the sources she references.  I’m obsessed with process.  I’m convinced that a big difference between dancers who improve and dancers who don’t improve is the processes they use (if any).  The pedagogy of teaching musicality is a subject that’s rich for mining, I think.  I’d looove to have that discussion!

Conclusions

One of the main reasons that I started writing about how I think about dancing was to get contrasting views, and for this reason alone, I loved reading the post.  I got some pointers to cool resources and got a peek inside someone else’s thought process.