The craze for the cool

"Dancers are an admirable bunch of people. The way they work. The stress is extraordinary. It's a difficult career. I think it's hellish; the fact that they are over the hill as they're emotionally maturing. That calls for a terrific strength of character." ~ Lady D. MacMillan

One of the things that remain constant in ballroom dancing is people's craze for learning "cool" moves. I know this well as I used to be like that some time. In fact, that was one of my motivations to join ballroom dance team at UMass; I wanted to learn more moves than what they taught us in the club. Later as I started competing, I wanted to learn more moves because that would make me win. Every time I didn't make it in the finals, I would attribute it to the others knowing more moves than I did. The coaches and veteran dancers kept telling me that it wasn't what we were doing, but how we were doing them mattered the most. I wanted to not believe them, but experience brought me down to the reality.

In the time that followed, I learned the importance of doing something well than doing a lot with lesser quality. I realized how easy it was to learn a "cool" move, but how difficult to train my body to shape for that move. And this wasn't just about techniques as many competitive dancers believe. My coach Gunnar told me about three levels: learning steps, learning techniques, and shaping your body. One can easily learn steps of say, silver level Waltz in a day; one takes a few weeks to learn and practice techniques for those steps, and it takes months to shape one's body to silver Waltz. How many of us think about this? Surely not the most of the beginners. In fact, in my experience I have seen this factors as a determining of the maturity of a dancer. Many "advance" dancers who are still crazy for cool moves are not mature enough and on the other hand, I have seen some beginners who are more "responsible" to their dancing.

What makes even serious competitive dancers drift toward learning more and more moves than working with their techniques and training their bodies? Simple reason, which is well-studied in psychology: principle of least effort. As noted before, training one's body takes a long time, whereas new steps can be learned in a session and one can see the "progress" immediately. After all, we're in this for fun, right?

I know about some East European and Russian studios where they teach their competitive dancers the "hard way" - drilling, drilling, and drilling. Take one step and just keep doing monotonous drillings to bring it to perfection and train the body. It's no surprise that they make it big in the world ballroom dance scene. On the other hand I know a lot many people who have "laid back" attitude for dancing. Of course they have lot of fun, but I don't get surprised when they realize their limitations. Learning cool moves is different than looking cool (alright, don't get started on the semantics now!).

Finally it comes down to choices. Nothing is bad, but each has its pros and cons. Going out for social dancing and doing cool moves is surely fun, but don't be surprised if you don't become a world champion. Being hard on you for training your body and doing boring drills instead of learning new moves may not make you socially popular, but have patience and down the line you are likely to get more attention on the floor even if you're doing basic moves.