Should I break the mirror?

Just off one of those humiliating videotapings which due to some masochistic tendency, I feel compelled to subject myself from time to time. This is my desperate search for perspective and consolation ….

“The two distinguishing elements of the Tango are sensuality and elegance.” Carlos Gavito. –

“Ah, therein lies the rub.” Shakespeare. –

… the tension between wanting to feel good (sensuality) and wanting to look good (elegance). Two differing focuses. One inward, the other outward. 

The perfect Tango?

(Proverbial wisdom):  “A perfect tango is not only a beautiful experience for both partners but also must be beautiful to an audience. Is this true? If we believe we must look a certain way to observers, how does it affect our inner experience?” Judgment and Acceptance while Dancing Argentine Tango: a data-driven approach to explore the inner experience of tango dancers. Mitra Martin and Avik Basu. Substack, Feb 1. (An excellent and detailed analysis of the above question.)

In Edmonton, all our dance halls have a mirrored wall at one end. For half of my journey around the dance floor, I am turned away from the mirror, for the other half toward. This changes not only what I perceive of my dancing but how I experience it.

Back to the mirror I turn inward, focusing on the feeling of the dance, my connection and communication with my partner. When I turn the corner and look into the mirror – snap!

The sensitive, introspective artist gets booted out by the autocratic, judgmental adjudicator.  Inner feelings are overridden by a preoccupation with how my dancing looks from the outside. My subjective experience of the dance gets objectified: form over feeling, visual over sensual, public performance over intimate connection.

Time to break the mirror?

Not just yet.

According to dance theorist, Aimie C.E. Purser, The Moment: The Dancing Body-Subject and Inhabited Transcendence,   

… the objectification of the body in the mirror image distracts from or interrupts the uninhibited flow of the dancer’s movement. This sense of experiencing the body as part of your own subjective presence to the world rather than as an object (shape) in the world was described by a number of the dancers with the phrase ‘being in your body’.

‘Being in your body is, however, a mode of experience that characterises expertise with a movement sequence and is thus not necessarily present in the early stages of the learning process: There might be a point when you first learn a piece when you’re not in your body because it takes time to let the movement settle in your body.’ [Louisa] 

This distinction is consistent with Dreyfus’ model of skill acquisition where the learner needs to rely on conscious mental representations of the correct movement or of the rules for appropriate movement. For Dreyfus (2001), the expert passes through this stage into a state where movement emerges intuitively rather than requiring mental processing.… we find ourselves needing to consciously process what is going on rather than just being able to act intuitively. 

Brain vs. body, thinking vs. feeling.

So what is going on here?

It turns out that watching yourself in the mirror, or mirroring your instructor’s steps, or videotaping yourself is essential to refining your practice. We need all the visual and verbal instruction we can get, accompanied by the accompanying critiques and external judgements and ego inflations or deflations usually deflations. All part of the process.

This brain-based instruction then has to be translated into bodily understanding to coordinate what you are doing with what you think you are doing and what you want to be doing. This external reflection and representation is essential to the learning process as one acquires the requisite skills for the dance experience to be internalized and become instinctual.

This doesn’t happen automatically. It takes a lot of time and practice. It is like learning a language. We have to spend long laborious hours learning grammar and vocabulary before we can begin to communicate fluently. 

However, one has to keep in mind the ultimate focus of your dance.  As with a language, the end goal is not the externals (good grammar and diction with speaking and good technique with dance), but communicating something meaningful with feeling or conviction. I have never come away from a conversation reflecting, “My, they had good diction. And how about  all those verb tenses they used!”

The Heart rules.

At some point, you have to turn away from the mirror and turn your focus inside. Address the questions: “How does the dance feel for me, for my partner? Where is the connection? What exactly am I trying to communicate?” 

So don’t break the mirror. You will always have to answer, at least intermittently, to its cold, dispassionate glare. It’s just that ultimately it is not the judge of the quality of your dancing.

Your heart is.

(Photo credit Eugenia Maximova)