So, I read this article (Training Strong Dancers in the Age of Instant Gratification by Meredith Pennington at The Competitive Edge) and can absolutely sympathize with her frustrations here.
In the article, she is talking about how we HAVE to be strict about discipline, technique, and practice when it comes to training strong dancers. That the expectation from dance students is that they will be able to perform or learn all they need to know – or to teach! in only a couple sessions or a year of dancing. Meredith teaches competitive dancing, where dancers usually begin dancing as children, so the culture and demographic is a little different from what we find in belly dance. So, let’s talk about belly dance then.
I have been teaching belly dance for over a decade now. With 18 years of dance experience, I fully admit that I started teaching too early. I was VERY lucky in that I am a natural teacher – which is helped by the fact that I am a very slow student who struggles a lot.
By the time we become adults, and this is especially true for women (but not exclusive to women), we are taught that making mistakes or failing at something (more accurately, not mastering something immediately) is very bad. Like, really horribly awfully bad. Like, a reflection of your worthlessness as a human being. Especially if other people see us! If we do not see immediate success, we become discouraged and we feel like we are hopeless and, in a word, suck.
There are a lot of reasons why this happens and I’m not going to go into them in this post. But it is NOT your fault that you feel this way. Please trust me, though, when I tell you it just isn’t true. I am not exaggerating at all when I tell you that it took me over a year of DAILY practice to get my 3/4 Shimmy (which I learned as the Egyptian Walking Shimmy). OVER a year. Imagine my delight when I finally got it!
See, I was lucky and my parents raised me to believe that I could develop any skill with only two things: hard work and raw stubbornness. Raw stubbornness will get you a lot of things and if you’re willing to pair that up with hard work, nothing will stop you. Seriously. I shit you not. So it is with those two things, plus knowledge of how to use a library, that they armed me for the world and seriously, that is all you need to succeed. At anything. Absolutely serious!
In belly dance, we have these really weird ideas. Belly dance is not a “high” artform like ballet is. Nor is it as structured or standardized. In the USA, it is pretty abnormal for belly dancers to begin dancing before adulthood – most of our new, beginning students are adults – and usually in their thirties or forties. And our professional dancers do not retire from the stage at 25 – they perform well into their elder years! Helena Vlahos, one of America’s most famous belly dancers known for her quarter rolling belly trick, is nearly 70 and still a highly sought after performer and teacher. Not in that cutesy “she must have been something in her day” kind of way, either, but in a “good luck keeping up with her, current internationally known stars of today!” kind of way. Seriously, I cannot keep up with her – she is amazing. Rachel Brice, who is probably the MOST famous belly dancer right now and MOST sought after performer is in her mid-forties. That is unheard of in the professional dance community outside of belly dance.
Unfortunately, that means that most people consider belly dance to be easy. It does not help that part of the skill set a belly dancer develops is making it look easy. Oh, the irony!
In addition, most of our new students don’t have ANY dance background. They are unfamiliar with how difficult and demanding jazz, ballet, tap, and modern classes really are. Which can cause a lot of problems, including:
– high drop out rates
– excessive frustration
– body insecurity
– lack of discipline
– low self esteem
– embarrassment
– fear of working hard
– inability to enjoy hard work
Students that DO continue on and begin mastering techniques and skills often face further issues:
– lack of recognition
– not enough esteem
– large egos
– unwilling to keep pushing themselves
– staying in their comfort zone
– being judgmental
– being unsupportive
There are other issues, of course, but I’ll talk about them some other time.
I mentioned it earlier, but something I owe my ability to teach to is that I struggled SO MUCH all the way through my dancing. There are VERY few things that came to me naturally. Posture, balance, weight transitions, foot work, isolations, keeping rhythms, body awareness, coordinating multiple body parts at once – all of these were a struggle for me. And I don’t mean the kind of struggle where it takes you a few months to figure it out, but the kind of struggle where it took a team of teachers to help me figure it out – to communicate all the information I needed in order to understand and execute whatever skill I was trying to learn. Some teachers became very frustrated with me because I did not pick up what they were teaching right away and I have learned to just keep asking questions until I get it – but sometimes that means staying after class or consulting with someone else so as not to hold up the entire class. YES, I am that student!
So, students that are out there, please – do not become discouraged if something isn’t easy. Technique really IS important and believe me you will feel an amazing sense of pride when not only can you do something, but you can do it well and with exceptional technique. Natural aptitude will only get you so far – trust me when I tell you that I can watch a dancer and tell who has put in the hours and who hasn’t.
If you want something and you have the physical part to do it, all you need is discipline and stubbornness to master it. There is a beautiful sense of satisfaction that comes from doing something that is extremely difficult that no one will ever be able to take away from you.
And when you’re dancing and someone comes up from you, a cute little old lady, and she introduces herself and tells you that she is from Turkey and that you dance just like the stars over there, it is a feeling like no other.
~ Nathara