How well do you know your own body?

Bodies, words, and dancing ... these are a few of my favourite things 

I was inspired to write this by a video that was shared online and you can see here. In it, Anya Katsevman talks about focusing your dancing somewhere even more fundamental than your feet – inside your own body. She tells us to "dance from the inside out." She talks about how the words dance teachers use can only go so far in explaining what you need to do. Really, you need to know how your body feels and how it works. This resonated deeply with me. 

 

I learnt salsa initially in Japan and my Japanese was pretty limited. This means that for a long time, salsa was non-linguistic for me. Maybe that’s part of what I loved about it. The rest of my life is all about words. As a language teacher and linguistics researcher, I am a very word-focused person. But salsa was something that was being explained to me in words I didn’t understand on any level, so I learnt it through feeling. I didn’t start teaching salsa until I had been dancing for over ten years, partly because I simply didn’t have the words.

 

When I started taking lessons in Manchester, I realised that even though I understood the words they were saying to me, I didn’t really understand what I was meant to be doing. 

“Push into the ground” … OK, where else would I be pushing? 

“Engage your frame” … uh huh, I think I am. 

And then, one day, something would click, and I would feel what those words meant in my body rather than understanding them in my brain, and then those technique points would become part of my dancing. 

 

Words are limited when it comes to describing physical sensations. I say this as a linguist who believes that language patterns developed out of our embodied experience. Still, words don’t come near what we are trying to evoke when we talk about pleasure, pain, and the mechanics of dancing. We use metaphors all the time because our vocabulary is inadequate to the task. Different metaphors resonate with different people. In lessons, I enjoy looking for the form of words that work for the person I am teaching at the time – words and dancing; my two great passions. However, I also know that I could use a hundred different metaphors, and say them one hundred times each, and they still wouldn’t work until someone has felt the thing I am trying to describe. I love those ‘Eureka!’ moments when someone finds the feeling. 

 

I started practicing yoga about ten years ago and I am sure that this made a huge difference to my body awareness. There are many things I love about yoga. One is that it is viewed as a lifelong practice rather than something you ever finish learning. You are constantly improving and often it is an increased awareness of the mechanics of your own body that makes the difference. Engaging one tiny part in a different way can alter a pose completely. This is totally transferable to salsa. 

 

In salsa you are also either leading or following another person’s body. How can you expect to affect or respond to another body unless you know how your own one works? So, I suppose the advice is to focus inward, take your teachers words (if you understand them), and really think about the sensations in your body that they are imperfectly trying to describe. Good dancing is a lot more about how it feels than how it looks, although using a mirror is a good way to link what things look like to how things feel. It is rare that we give ourselves time to truly focus on how our own bodies work and feel, so try it and see what a difference it makes. And take up yoga.