Music In Class Vol. II

Music is essential to dancing. Music inspires the dancers; Swing is the music that made and makes the dance what it is. Music is the key to our dance and, as such, should receive attention in class. We already know that music in class should swing. But what other factors related to music in class should we watch out for?

Tempo

I've seen many moments where Lindy Hop was taught to 28 bpm. This is quite slow. Also when teaching beginners it is easy to fall into the trap of wanting to help them by playing very slow music so they can practice "stress-free".
One defining part of lindy hop is momentum exchanged on a line. If music turns too slow, momentum dies. So we have to have a certain amount of tempo - even for beginners - else we have no way to dance lindy hop. I've set my personal lower limit to 34 bpm which I feel is more or less the slowest where you can have easily momentum. That is generally speaking of course. In a slow lindy class, I will break that limit.

Walking bass

This aspect was touched in Volume I, but should be reiterated here. Hearing the rhythm can be troublesome for people that are not used to it. That is why I sometimes revert to music with a strong walking bass. One moment is when I teach beginners. Another moment is when I teach workshops in scenes where the music played tends to be non-swing. In both cases the walking bass helps the students to hear the rhythm without losing the swing.

Pre- and "Post"paration

Prepare your music in advance! It costs time to search for music in class and that is time that your class will lack in dancing. Try to plan at least basics; When do you want to play music in class? What you want to practice during that time? It will give you clear indicators of what kind of music you will need.
Also "post"-pare your music. I keep a list of music I've compiled for teaching that I continually update. Removing songs that didn't work as expected and adding new ones. It includes music in range from 30-56 bpm and has different styles - mainly traditional swing and New Orleans Jazz.

Having your music prepared and matching your music to your exercises and students will enrich your class and guarantee you and your students a better experience.

There Is Different And There Is Shit

Recently I was in the train and a fellow lindy hopper joined me and we started talking about ways of teaching and the implications each method has. What I noticed was that the implementation is often overseen, no matter what method is used. The topic is important to me, because I think there are many misconceptions especially about teaching beginners, and there are many things that, once taught, are hard to reverse.

Disclaimer: While this article is sparked by a discussion about teaching beginners, its application reaches to teaching in general. 

There are many people that add "that's just different" in discussions. But no, not everything is just different! It's impossible. If it were, there would be no need for levels in classes, since they are all doing the same and there is not better and worse. But some are better and some are worse and so we differentiate. When it comes to teaching methods we have to think at least two dimensional (just "different" would be one dimensional). There is different and then there is the quality of the implementation.

Bottom Up

I used to teach by dissecting everything down to a T and then building up from there. This is the way I learned it. Crash courses would start by having students rock step over and over again, of course with addition of how much weight is actually shifted back and forth. Then we would add triples, triple for a while, then add those together, etc. Teaching a basic side by side Charleston would take forever, usually by the end people had forgotten how to walk and were completely up in their heads, while the movement still wouldn't be any good.
What happened inside of the students? We had taken something that they new very well (walking) and had broken it down into so many parts, that they couldn't handle it anymore. We created problems for them, that they didn't have before.

Also we had taken complete control over them and placed mistrust in them, by arrogantly showing them again what they had been doing properly for 20-40 years already. Two perfect ways to demotivate students.

Top Down versus Bottom Up

Opposed to this way of step by step instructing or also known as bottom up, is the so called top down approach. We start with the complete picture (doing the movement) and when problems arise we address those. The question is not which approach is better but rather what material suits which approach and how the approach is implemented. Top down works great with simple movements in the beginning and they can become increasingly difficult with increasing level of the dancers. Bottom up works perfectly to structure a class, a workshop or a class series.

 Technique As Solo Body Movement

What I've seen a lot as and also what I guess most people that have had bad experiences with top down is "Just do it" and "Move your body" with no explanation or support. That people will struggle in those classes and have "feet to be sorted" is obvious. The problem is the implementation though and not the approach. Something I've picked up recently is something I've seen Dax Hock do and what I call "Technique as Solo Body Movement". This approach trains dancers to first get the solo body movement to follow and lead the movement and then apply it by just connecting physically to the partner. This is genius. This way technique isn't a construct for mental masturbation anymore but rather something that helps the dancers. It decreases talk time, increases dance time, decreases mind-focused dancing, and increases the amount of details transferred.

That's why I roll with solo body movement not only in trains. Always remember - it's what you do and it's the way that you do it.


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How Goals Can Kill Your Fun

Something I see quite often at parties and classes is that beginners have a lot of fun and intermediates and advanced ones less. When talking to them, it matches the impression - beginners tell me how great everything is and how much fun they have while intermediates and andvances ones tell me what they are working on and what they are doing wrong and what they need to improve. Think about it for a second - How was it when you started, and how is it now? How come there is this shift? I think this is due to a shift from process to goals and faulty comparisons. 

Process vs. goal orientation

What is so much fun in the beginning is the dancing. It's the process of dancing. When people dance longer, the wish for improvement becomes very strong. Remember, - you also advanced as beginner without to strong of thinking about the getting better part. Dancing becomes goal focussed. There are two problems with this:

1. The process isn't important anymore, despite it not being the goal but the process what we actually spend time on.
2. "Good" is not even close to clearly defined and usually the "good" shifts always higher and hence is never attainable

Is it bad to have goals? No, not at all! I think they can greatly enhance the process of everything, e.g. when preparing classes, but there are two things to watch out for:

Goals have to be reachable so that they stay motivating and even more important, goals should be used to define steps of a process!

Faulty Comparisons

The other observation I have made are faulty comparisons. People compare themselves with others. "Karlheinz learns faster than I", "The W Project rocks so much harder than we do". What happens here is that when you compare yourself with others you are likely to oversee that Karlheinz goes out dancing three times a week and dances all night long, while you might go only to your weekly classes. We tend to oversee the process. This can be quite demotivating and very inhibiting to your own learning process and maybe even the whole dancing. The W Project rocks indeed very hard, but they also train a lot!  Also something I find quite note worthy about the W Project is the comment from Anais Sékine that most of all they had a blast during all their trainings. That is process orientation right there.

While the work has in the end to be done by each individual themselves, there is at least one thing we can do as teachers to encourage desired thoughts in our students. Both faulty comparison and goal orientation are part of the description of what Dr. Ellen Langer calls mindlessness. So what we can do is support mindfullness. Mindfullness can be encouraged by not using absolute facts, but conditional facts. Instead of what you are telling the students is the truth, it is the truth for a certain context. 

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Reverse Lindy: Find Beginners Material As Beginner

Everyone who teaches will eventually run into the curse of knowledge and be faced with a full class of beginners who are totally lost. When developing beginners material there are a few factors that have to be considered. The material is supposed to be fun, easy to learn, but at the same time very basic. These manifold goals naturally open up many different ways of teaching beginners.

This article talks about how I got to what I do nowadays when teaching beginners.

Reverse lindy hop is everything in lindy hop done in reverse. Ta-Da! :) A small example: If you start as leader in a swingout with your right foot back, hold the left hand of the follower instead of right, with your right, instead of your left, and you turn to your left instead of to your right, then you are doing what I call reverse lindy hop. Max & Annie are doing this here.

Starting Out

When I first learned lindy hop we didn't use any technique really, in the next school I learned a lot of technique. Technique was usually taught as a "boring" necessity you had to go through. When I taught my first beginners class, I did the same and taught lots of dull technique. Hence my beginner classes were hard and tedious. For a short period of time I tried to do "fun" classes with very limited focus on technique. This way I lost less students in comparison, but the classes were very unsatisfying to me, since I saw that my students would eventually have to re-learn everything. 

Something Is Wrong

At some point I realized two important things, that have completely shifted the way I teach lindy hop: First I realized - I had done so much technique that technique had become the goal itself. Second I noticed I couldn't do my beginners material out of the box with beginners, with the technique I wanted them to use. Out of the box meaning, without telling them how to react. This felt inherently wrong. So I decided that my lesson plan had to be completely changed.

Be A Beginner

I had been teaching reverse lindy hop for ages already, but I hadn't seen the true value in it. Until then reverse lindy had been more of a game. Reverse lindy hop had one funny property - it was surprisingly difficult. Even as a good dancer I couldn't just switch everything to the other side. This proved extremely useful. Reverse lindy hop enabled me to put myself into beginner's shoes. I recommend everyone to dance reverse lindy for a while. 

Reverse Lindy Results

Everything arm-leading related and in open position turned out difficult. What proved easiest were close position and body leading. 

From close position with body leading you can easily develop everything. Keeping rhythm (as opposed to speed) is something that proved to be easier in close position as well. 

Putting Technique Back Where It Belongs

Starting with basic movements in close position and adding technique when needed has one more advantage it becomes a neccessity- it starts like math in school. First you have the positive whole numbers, at some point you subtract a bigger number from a smaller number and then you need and hence introduce the negative numbers. 

For that necessity to arise, you will have to let them try first and also let them fail. If you anticipate their failure and introduce the new technique beforehand, it easily turns again into "just" technique.
What I experienced is that technique when only taught right in the moment when needed, no one finds technique boring and no one minds. My classes end up to be way more successful than the "pure" fun and no technique classes. Technique has become what it was originally designed for: not a goal itself, but a support for dancing better with your partner.

The Open Position

Now there was only one thing left. It takes forever to get into open position, which is actually quite a fun position to be in and good to know for social dancing. 

In the meantime I had found out, that I wasn't the only one working on this topic, but also quite a bunch of friends - including my favorite dance instructor, Dax Hock, who also provided the above math analogy - seem to have ended up with more or less the same conclusion. The trick I picked to solve the open position debacle ended up being from Birgit, a great teacher from Berlin who runs her own dance studio www.jeder-ist-tanzbar.de. It's a send out. Open position there you are! From there you can do the underarm pass, which is a nice and easy move, and from there come back to close position. 

Share your thoughts on how you teach your beginners below!