Teaching Musicality

AndaBien said:
There are both similarities and differences. I may walk absent-mindedly, but I hope I never dance that way. When I do a giro to the left, in a sense my footwork is automatic (subconscious?), but I'm also paying full attention to my and my partners movements and rhythms.
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Yeah, you can always choose to focus on whatever you want, and I do that as well. It's different from when I first started out, in that I had to (consciously) think about so many things, that I could get overloaded, and not give enough focus to everything that I needed. Now, with more things done by the subconscious, it allows me to relax more, focus on the things I choose to, and enjoy the experience much more. I doubt I'll ever be able to turn things like floorcraft over to the subconscious, though.
 
dchester said:
An example of the "subconscious" handling something, would be walking down the street. I suspect you don't spend much time thinking about where to place your foot or how to do it, when walking down the street. You might be thinking about a song, how good you feel today, what happened at work, or many other things, but you don't need to "consciously" think about walking, as it's normally handled subconsciously.
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The implication here is that you do think about your foot placement even
if in time it becomes less conscious as AndaBien is indicating.
One of the biggest differences in approach is that I rarely if ever think about
foot placement even less about any sort of pre-ordained footwork.

The woman allows her free leg to follow her own body, which you have
moved together with yours, and your leg follows your own body.
No conscious thinking, you are moving as intuitively as your partner.

It allows you to forget your feet and concentrate on your partner's dance.
 
When a musician improvises, he doesn't do it note by note. Instead, he uses his chops, which are sequences he's practiced hundreds of times. He may be inspired to play a 3-note arpeggio, (which his fingers then do subconsciously, even thought he's fully aware of the arpeggio). So it's a 3-note sequence, even though he only thinks of it as one thing, a unit of music. Based on that arpeggio, he may be inspired to play 3 more arpeggios, each one starting on a note higher, giving a whole ascending series. It's composed of sequences of 4 arpeggios, composed of 12 notes, but he now thinks of it as a larger unit of music. At that point it has truly become planned out in advance, because it may take several seconds to complete the whole thing. After that he may be inspired to play the whole thing again, but this time upside down, starting high and finishing low. Again, it's a predetermined sequence. (For sure, music is usually a lot faster than dance, but it could be a dirge). He's improvising, but just in larger units than single notes.

If I feel inspired to do a giro to the left, there are many to choose from based on the situation - which feet my partner and I are on, whether her next step is inclined forward or backward - so there are many possible giro sequences (chops) that I may choose from. I would subconsciously choose the appropriate way to begin. I would call that improvising, but using predefined sequences. The sequence may be altered in mid-step, or not, but my initial intention was a single unit of dance, composed of a sequence.

I would follow that with something, perhaps a different unit of dance. If I liked those two units together, and how they went with the music, I might decide to repeat them, giving another longer section of dance, planned out into the next few seconds, and fitting into the music nicely. That little repeated sequence would give a structure to my dance, related to the music, that I would enjoy.
 
Found some stuff from "Guitar Zero."

"the brain makes a transition from explicit or "Declarative" knowledge...to proceduralization.. As knowledge becomes proceudralized, we sometimes feel as if we know something in our fingers of musicles but lose the capacity to explicitly explain what is going on."

"Often, mental representations that are initially stored in the preforntal cortex (which we associate with conscious cognition) shift to new parts of the brain such a sth hippocampus, associated with memory, and the motor cortex and the basal ganglia, which are in charge of the more immediate control of our muscles."

This is followed by the question "Why do we need teachers at all?"

If you find the book at Amazon, you can currently "Look Inside."
 
Subconscious is when you go into the kitchen to get some matches, but you grab a beer instead.
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No that's just getting older.
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Our subconscious knows that in heaven there is no beer. That's why we drink it here.

(OK, ATers, anyone get the reference. I'll even hum a few bars. da dada dada da da, da da, da da, da da... anyone?)
 
Steve Pastor said:
Our subconscious knows that in heaven there is no beer. That's why we drink it here.

(OK, ATers, anyone get the reference. I'll even hum a few bars. da dada dada da da, da da, da da, da da... anyone?)
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Your humming isn't as good as it use to be, but I'll guess Willie Nelson.
 
AndaBien said:
When a musician improvises, he doesn't do it note by note. Instead, he uses his chops, which are sequences he's practiced hundreds of times. He may be inspired to play a 3-note arpeggio, (which his fingers then do subconsciously, even thought he's fully aware of the arpeggio). So it's a 3-note sequence, even though he only thinks of it as one thing, a unit of music. Based on that arpeggio, he may be inspired to play 3 more arpeggios, each one starting on a note higher, giving a whole ascending series. It's composed of sequences of 4 arpeggios, composed of 12 notes, but he now thinks of it as a larger unit of music. At that point it has truly become planned out in advance, because it may take several seconds to complete the whole thing. After that he may be inspired to play the whole thing again, but this time upside down, starting high and finishing low. Again, it's a predetermined sequence. (For sure, music is usually a lot faster than dance, but it could be a dirge). He's improvising, but just in larger units than single notes.

If I feel inspired to do a giro to the left, there are many to choose from based on the situation - which feet my partner and I are on, whether her next step is inclined forward or backward - so there are many possible giro sequences (chops) that I may choose from. I would subconsciously choose the appropriate way to begin. I would call that improvising, but using predefined sequences. The sequence may be altered in mid-step, or not, but my initial intention was a single unit of dance, composed of a sequence.

I would follow that with something, perhaps a different unit of dance. If I liked those two units together, and how they went with the music, I might decide to repeat them, giving another longer section of dance, planned out into the next few seconds, and fitting into the music nicely. That little repeated sequence would give a structure to my dance, related to the music, that I would enjoy.
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Yeah, I'm in agreement with you on what improvised vs choreographed means. I was just trying to figure out what JohnEm meant (and while I'm still not positive, it's very different from what you or I would say it is).

It's like when I'm leading a back ocho, I might decide next to do another ocho, a boleo, walk to the cross, start a giro, etc. My guess is he would consider it "choreography" if you think ahead two or three steps, and that it's only improvised when you only think about the next step. It had never even occurred to me that someone would think that, so I had no clue what he was talking about.
 
JohnEm, you've mentioned a few times that your manner "eliminates the mental effort", of planning ahead, if I've got that correct.

Another way of seeing it is that my method actually reduces mental effort. I don't have to decide what to do next, after every step. If I decide to just walk for a while, I'm free from making decisions for as long as that takes, unless I change my mind. Once I've got a concept of what I want to do, I no longer have to think about it, unless it's interrupted, of course.
 
dchester said:
It had never even occurred to me that someone would think that, so I had no clue what he was talking about.
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If you take the line of thinking to the ultimate, it only becomes an ocho at all in retrospect, because you found that you had spontaneously led two pivoting walks. You would never set out to. I think that I would find that rather restrictive, in interpreting the arch of a musical phrase, rather than liberating: which isn't to say that I never do just move one step at a time, and see what comes of it - I do - but I wouldn't want to feel that I had to, or face being held to be an inferior dancer for being a slave to choreography.
 
UKDancer said:
Me too: but I would comment that you could rarely dance that big at any milonga, let alone a crowded one. It was a performance, even if a rather low key one.
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For sure. Anytime a couple is offered the entire floor to themselves they know that in return they have an obligation to entertain the audience.
 
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