Cafe chat: learning

Blane and Bryan

After the Saturday afternoon practica in Glasgow I went with some friends to a cafe, which is a kind of loose custom with some of us.

I went to the practica because I have been dancing the other role regularly since about the winter and yet I can't really "do" ochos or ocho cortados in the other role.  It hadn't really bothered me until recently I started thinking they might be a good thing sometimes.

I had tried learning the "cross" in the few guy classesI tried before I realised that was the really hard way to learn and later with friends...Parallel system....cross system....she has to be on this foot, I have to be on that foot...the timing has to be right...and everyone had different ways of doing it.  It was hopeless.  So despite that it's a classic "move" I gave up trying to figure out how to "lead" the cross and then one day it must have just happened on its own.

It was the same with ochos.  On the rare occasions I have tried to "do" them in the past I had to wholly stop the dance, engage the thinking mechanism and literally work out how to do it, by which time of course I have become completely deaf to the music not to mention treating my partner as some kind of malleable object.  This method is excellent for discovering the different levels of patience among friends! Of the few I inflicted this on, everyone has been extraordinarily tolerant. I suspect it's just practice.

But I do think it has to be practice, said as such to a partner, because it isn't fair or right to practice your brand new "moves" on some unwitting suspect you invite for a social dance if it's to the extent of having to stop, work things out and start again.

Treating a milonga as a practica is a no-no, treating a practica as a milonga can work to an extent.  Many locally, perhaps a majority, go to practicas to dance socially which illustrates a gap in the market for  a certain kind of regular, relaxed social dance event.  Perhaps it also explains why afternoon tea dances in my area are so popular.  But I think trying something out in a practica but disguising it as a social dance is a  mistake.  I refused a new dancer recently who invited me - directly - to a social dance in a practica.  I don't think I was wrong but I still felt bad.  Next time I saw him I asked him if he wanted to practice together in both roles and we did.  He was so good in the other (woman's) role it was revelatory.  I suspect that the earlier a guy starts to dance in the other role, the better he is in both, sooner.  

So I wanted to practice ochos with my friends, who in this case turned out to be the patient and tolerant Bryan who sometimes likes to change role too.  That's not surprising because pretty much all the best guy dancers I know also dance or have danced the other role.  In fact I swapped roles with three guys at the practica so was delighted.  I've noticed before once one guy sees a guy swapping, others seem happier to do so too.  But I notice many, especially with less experience, prefer to swap with women than with other guys, whereas in fact, it is better to swap roles with a variety of people (you like and trust). 

In the end in the way these things often go Bryan and I practised not ochos, but a kind of turn I like that he does.  I couldn't remember which feet we both had to be on:  "If we are one creature, he needs to be on our first foot, and I need to be on our fourth foot."  But that was too complicated. So then: 

 "Ah, if I remember that our outer thighs need to be together and then the turn is what is counter intuitive then it might come to me." 

 "I don't think so", said Bryan, "It is from the chest, really", which of course, is true.

I did kind of get it eventually, through a combination of those last two points but was left with the unmistakeable sense that how I - we? - pick things up is very nebulous, hard to define, although I know fairly clearly how I don't learn well.  

Afterwards in the cafe we were chatting about how we learn.  Bryan does everything - videos, lessons, by feel and sense; Blane said he was a visual learner, he had to see what his feet were doing.  I said talk and seeing it demonstrated was utterly lost on me.   I suspected that if I was to learn a new "thing" I would have to do it and feel it - ideally by an experienced guy backleading it for me, and then do it over til I got the sense of it.  

 "I really believe everyone learns best that way. You know that proverb:  'What I hear, I forget; What I see, I remember; What I do, I understand.' It's a bit like that."
 "No, everyone learns differently."

So after I'd been mocked into being less camera-shy we decided to each say how we "do"/"lead" the cross in the guy's role.  The sound isn't very good on the videos but I think you can see we all had different views.  This was Bryan in time-honoured cafe-fashion using a fork to represent the spine of his partner which I think he moves past the saucers: her feet.  Blane demonstrates in serious Glaswegian style his new view that it's all about flow, whereas I just had no idea.