Momentum - A Good Basis For Creativity

In the beginning stage of becoming a teacher I asked myself what defines me as dancer and back then I concluded that part of it was the creativity bit. I know there have been discussions about the topic and the word, but for me it's like any other discipline - not a magical property some people have and some don't, but rather something that you learn. The following is an excerpt from my creativity class.

There are two main definitions of creativity in psychology today that are accepted: A creative work is when you do something new and on purpose and A creative work is when you do something new and on purpose that is of value to the domain. When I talk about creativity, I always only assume the two attributes the definitions share.

One of the aspects that visually attributes to lindy hop to me is the exchange of energy on a line and thus the momentum that we have to have. Momentum itself can be understood as composed of two elements - a linear and a rotational energy (for simplicity we'll ignore the vertical aspects for right now). Concrete: we can go forward, backward, turn left and right. We can combine the linear and the rotational movement (turn left while going forward etc.) and we can do those movements at different speeds, which makes it scalable. This will make the difference between a turn to the right and the leader's movement of an underarm pass.

A key to creative work to me is to start with something existing and then modify it as opposed to starting from scratch. Changing the energies leaves you, depending abit on how you count, with four options: increasing and decreasing of the linear and rotational energy and the combinations of it. Decreasing an energy might lead to zero energy - no linear but only rotational energy is what we call a spin - or inversed - going forward instead of backword - energy.

You can apply this during or at the end/begining of a move. A nice side effect of this is that resulting movements are fairly easy to integrate into the dancing, because they connect automatically.

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Creative Uncertainty

The Words we use play a major role, like take the power of phrasing instructions positively. By using words, we create an image in people's minds. Talking about things not to do, we imagine those things. I've always wondered why so many people don't dance more creatively despite the vast majority of teachers teaching leading and following, which makes creativity and the leading and following of new movements possible.

The piece that makes the picture complete came in a book called "Mindfulness" by Dr. Ellen Langer. She has conducted a series of studies about the influence of words used when teaching about new objects. The results are that when new items were introduced conditionally e.g. "This could be a pencil", people would find a lot more possible alternative usages than people that the item got introduced to unconditionally, as a fact, e.g. "This is a pencil". Introducing new items unconditionally creates a bit of uncertainty because it suggests that it could be used differently. She calls this creative uncertainty, because it allows for creative usage of the items. Creative usage means usage of an item in a, for that person, new way.

Langer's results clearly show why people often have trouble using the material taught in classes creatively. We teach new moves as "This is a swingout", "This is the beginning of a swing out". Saying a swingout could be a swingout feels off to me. Exits and entries to moves on the other hand are quite variable. Saying "This could be an exit to XYZ" sounds actually quite ok. Check out where you introduce facts in class, by stating something is something and try to see if there isn't a way of introducing it conditionally.

The other result that I found interesting about her studies to this piece of puzzle is that when things get introduced as "this is one possibility" - items get used more creatively than unconditional introduction but less good than "real" conditional. Introducing something as "This is one possibility" can be seen from time to time by lindy hop teachers. If you are already at this step, go a step beyond and go try conditional teaching. If you are not at this step yet, feel free to skip it. It's a bit like the fax machine. If you went from telephone to e-mail right away you didn't miss a thing.

By changing your phrasing, and I'm sure you can come up with more conditional phrasing, you will be able to teach creative usage of your material at the same time as your material. How cool is that?

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