Why worrying about how you look can hold your dancing back
Worried about how you look when you dance? Holding back can reduce your enjoyment and stop you discovering how freely you can move to music.
DANCING CONFIDENCESELF-CONSCIOUS DANCINGAFRAID TO DANCELEARNING TO DANCEDANCE WITHOUT EMBARRASSMENTMUSICALITYDANCING TO MUSICGROOVE FITNESS LEUVEN
Richard Ventham
10/19/20264 min read
I think a lot of people who say they can't dance don't actually dislike dancing.
They dislike the feeling that other people might be judging how they dance. And I understand that. Dancing is quite exposing. You can't really hide behind anything. You hear the music, your body does something in response, and there it is for everyone to see.
So you play it safe. Keep the movements small. Don't do anything that might look ridiculous. Stick to the beat, don't throw your arms around too much and definitely don't attempt that thing you just saw somebody else do.
The problem is that the more you restrict yourself because you're worried about looking like a bad dancer, the harder it becomes to get better at dancing.
You have to be willing to get it wrong
People sometimes tell me I'm a good dancer. I'm happy to take the compliment, but I didn't learn through years of dance training. I've done a bit of salsa, and some of that has definitely found its way into how I move, but most of my dancing has been learnt in a much less organised way.
I've watched people who I thought were good dancers and tried things they did.
Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it really didn't.
But if something felt good, I'd try it again. Then I'd change it slightly, use it with different music or combine it with something else. Gradually you work out what your body can do, what feels natural and, equally importantly, what probably isn't going to become part of your repertoire.
You can't really do that if you're constantly monitoring yourself and worrying about what everyone else thinks.
The confidence comes partly from the experimenting. You try something and it works, so next time you're willing to try something else. You move a little more freely, which makes dancing more enjoyable, so you do it more often. The more you dance, the more you learn.
It becomes a virtuous circle.
The opposite can happen too. You worry about looking silly, so you restrict your movement. Because you're restricting yourself, you experiment less. You don't discover as much about what your body can do and you never quite develop the confidence you were waiting for in the first place.
There's a strange paradox there.
People sometimes try to avoid looking like a bad dancer by restricting their movement. But that restriction can prevent them developing the very thing that would make them a better dancer.
Eventually you start hearing more of the music
There's another thing that happens when you've been dancing for a long time.
At first, the obvious thing to dance to is the beat. Most popular music gives you a reassuringly regular pulse to follow, and that's absolutely fine.
But over time I found myself dancing to much more than that.
I'll react to the bass, a bit of percussion, the voice, a stab of guitar or strings. I might put an extra movement between the main beats because there's something happening in the music that makes it feel right.
And you start anticipating the music too.
If it's a song I know well, that's obviously easier. I know what's coming.
But I can do it with music I've never heard before. You can often feel a build coming. You sense that the chorus is about to arrive, that everything is going to drop away for a moment, or that an instrumental section is coming. You've heard enough music to recognise the patterns.
So sometimes my dancing can look almost choreographed when it isn't. I'm not consciously counting out a complicated sequence in my head. I'm listening and responding to what I think the music is about to do.
I suppose the word for that is musicality.
But I didn't develop it by studying musical theory or memorising a list of dance moves. It grew from spending a lot of time dancing, trying things and becoming comfortable enough to experiment.
This isn't about becoming an amazing dancer
I should probably make something clear here. There is absolutely no requirement to become a "better dancer".
If you're moving to music and enjoying yourself, job done.
That's particularly important to me with Groove Fitness. The sequences give you something to follow, but they're not an exam. I don't care if someone uses the wrong arm, misses a step or decides to do something slightly different because it feels better.
In fact, I'd much rather see somebody enjoying the music and getting bits of my sequence wrong than spending the whole class anxiously trying to reproduce every movement perfectly.
The sequence is there to give you a framework. What happens inside that framework is yours. And perhaps that's a useful place to start outside a class too. Don't wait until you're confident before allowing yourself to experiment. A lot of the confidence comes from experimenting in the first place. Try the movement. Make it bigger. Make it smaller. Copy something you saw somebody else do. See what happens when you respond to a different part of the music.
Sometimes you'll think, yes, that worked. Sometimes you'll discover a move that should never see daylight again.
Both are useful.
Because the only way you really discover how your body can move to music is by giving it permission to find out.