Learning Movement
Why do some people learn to dance more quickly than others?
A question I’ve been exploring for ages. I am referring to innate characteristics most likely determined by genetics and movement patterns learned in childhood. The question has personal roots and professional implications.
Through school I’ve learned many new tidbits about how our bodies learn and store the information that, when recalled and put together, produces movement recognizable as “dance.” In truth, however, all movement is generated in the same fashion, more or less beautifully and efficiently depending on the individual.
Dean Juhan in Job’s Body writes:
Man, in a way that was not possible before the evolution of the cerebral cortex, is both freed and limited by what he imagines he can do. He has at his disposal hundreds of thousands of possible patterns of movement, built up by the millions of years of development of the spinal cord and the brainstem; he has in addition the ability to arrange these reflexes into as many new series as he wants. Yet he is powerless to organize these bits of motion into any purposeful sequence without first imagining clearly that sequence. An individual’s relative strength of will and sense of coordination are in fact nothing other than his relative ability to imagine clearly and in detail those acts he wishes to accomplish.
We’ve all heard of muscle memory. I would call it body memory, as all cells have the ability to receive, process, and store information. All systems of the body cooperate to make aesthetically pleasing movement, not simply the muscle fibers. Why are some lindy hop (and other dance) routines devoid of “soul”? Perhaps too much adrenaline is being released from a mild stress response, making the performers too jittery to connect with what drives them. Quite literally, anything could be wrong.
To imagine clearly, then, is to use not only our nervous system, but our whole bodies to engage the process, to feel the movement and the emotion all over. This is body awareness. In some it is natural. Others must develop it, but in this we are not created equal.