Originally Posted by DiamondBetty:
“Yay! Dancing IS joyful! It's a heartbeat, it's babies jigging to a song when they can't even stand up yet, it's Saturday night on a light up floor in a suburban town, Morris Men and village hall ballerinas and the equivalent all over the world.
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Yes, that's it! Dance is just what everyone does when there's music on and you find some sort of emotion in moving to it - happiness, laughter, sadness, excitement, fear, love, whatever! I quite liked country dancing at school, though mostly I just remember getting tangled up in the maypole and grabbing someone's hands and spinning as fast as we could doing ball-changes in a circle.
We were 10 at most, I'm pretty sure there's more to it than that...
To me dance for me is like language. Lots of people use it everyday and of course it's automatically there for everyone to use and to enjoy. You need the grammar/ technique and you need vocabulary if you want to be able to communicate well and for foreign languages (/ specific dance styles) you're almost certainly going to need to study something at some point, but the ultimate aim really is to absorb all those rules enough that you can stop thinking and just live in it. I've never danced AT and my experience of swing is limited to 3 weeks when a rock and roll course turned into the Lindyhop for reasons that escaped me (it was the first semester I lived in France and they were free lessons at the university sport centre - it took me 2 weeks to twig that the we were learning Lindyhop and not "landiop," as I'd previously thought
). I've danced ballroom though with partners who made me feel like waltzing was the most natural thing in the world. There were ballet routines that felt like stories, even when they were really only exercises. I've danced salsa where I've forgotten to think what the steps are but I'm doing them anyway; the steps are just the things that happen when the music's on and I'm doing it right.
Aggs, I completely agree with you as well. I had the same thought about Natalie a few years ago when she danced either rock and roll or lindyhop with Ricky, got to the end of the routine and was like "Wow! That was amazing! Maybe I should have learnt this before!" I think dancers in general continue learning until they stop dancing. That's part of the fun.
I respected Darcy as well, first for doing that musical theatre challenge where she learnt a load of classic Broadway dancers for a BBC show and then for learning a bit of ballroom and Latin pre-Strictly. It's that same sense that ok, she reached the end of her ballet career but that just meant she could try out other styles she was interested in.
I'm fascinated by dance history, the way that all of the dances have developed over time and still continue to develop today. On the topic of AT, I get the impression that there are specific types/ schools of AT and what we see on SCD is based on one particular type. Is that like the difference between Cuban Salsa and LA style salsa, is it more like RAD versus Cecchetti method ballet, is it more like the different styles of dance that fall under the swing umbrella or is it something else again? I suppose what I'm asking is, are there deliberately different forms of AT that people learn, or is it just different ways of learning/ different ways of choreographing the same style, or is AT itself changing at the moment into different styles?
(Suggestion: we seem now to have two threads anyway. The other thread is mostly for technical questions and answers to do with ballroom and Latin, where people can go to exchange specific information and find answers to questions. This one seems to be more general dance chat, springing from AT but going into other avenues as and when people want to go there. I can't say I care all that much about titles except to say that changing it completely away from AT might confused people (a.k.a. I'm clearly going to come back on the board and wonder what on earth this new thread is that I've apparently already posted on
).)
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AT is not your thing.
