Partner Dancing

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the processes involved with partner dancing and what it means to me. I have felt for some time that dancing might act well as a parallel to many aspects of relationships off the dance floor.

You have the leader and you have the follower, traditionally the man and the woman. I suppose in the years that I have danced, I ultimately strive to follow well. But what does this mean? The lead hints at a movement in various ways. It can be a change of weight in his body; it can be a momentum created by a previous move; it can be a push or a pull. Whatever the nature of the lead, it should stem from his centre. His body should create the initiation of a response in the follower. Subtle… oh so subtle. If the leader is aggressive in his lead, yanking my arm to make my body follow, I would quite frankly rather be flipping a beer mat in the corner. There is nothing worse than a leader dragging you through a move as though you have no say in the matter… In a similar vein, perhaps, the follower can often be accused of being too tense to allow the move to happen. In pre-empting what you think might happen (and this plays itself out a great deal in classes when the girls know what’s coming next and would go through the motions like robots whether or not the man is actually leading them in it), there is a risk of blocking a potential dynamic which might have been far more beautiful and creative to feel.

Too much Self on the dance floor prevents you from feeling a new space in the relationship with your partner.

So the man leads and hopefully I am connected through to my centre and can sense the motion and allow it to transfer into my body. You have to be open to his lead... receptive, sensitive, open. And beyond that? Now it is his turn. He has to be open to the creative way in which the follower receives the motion. He has to be relaxed to the point of not blocking or preventing the possibilities of ‘play’ which the follower then spins out. Both parties acting as one, but neither party preventing the freedom of the other. Both lead and follow creating something whole, but doing so out of a freedom which arises from interdependence.
Gibran wrote about marriage in ‘The Prophet’. Something in what he said has been resonating with me and I feel it is relevant here.

“Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

I just want to be open to possibilities in life and see where it all goes.