211–220 of 224 posts
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Why ballroom and not Tango? I find Tango pairs much more naturally to martial arts.
Ballroom is 10 dances which means 10 times the variety of music to dance to. Also our outfits are way fancier. :-p
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Someone else already pointed out that this is actually quite significant, just the time might have been too short but there is clear indication something is there. For me the key question is: what is the key ingredient (or the right mix of ingredients)? E.g. is it having a programme to follow (having aims/duties is known to increase longevity, see the famous 'plant study')? Or rhythmic fluid movements (so like tai ch…
I would guess the main driver for brain stimulation is the coordinative aspect of dealing with many motor skills over different body parts doing different things, while also coordinating the rhythms and cadence of music in your mind. So the more coordinated the movement (ballet, flamenco), the more stimulated. There's also the component of memorizing sequences. In this respect, yoga is also very fruitful. Many tradit…
Interesting that you mention flamenco [1]. I started dancing flamenco 8 years ago, at age 42. I am a late starter to dance, which is a polite way of saying I actively avoided it for most of my life.
When I started, I could barely put together a half-dozen steps. And if I tried to add arm, hand or head movements, my feet went out of time. My brain just didn't feel big enough There was no way I could remember even a tiny section of a choreography like this one I link to from Marco Flores.
Yet as I got more experienced, my brain gradually adjusted to think of body movements as integrated flows, not individual motions. It learnt how to "chunk" them together into logical sequences, and how they align to a piece of music. Much to my surprise, I can now remember complex choreographies several minutes long.
My next challenge is to internalize all of this, so I can relax and dance more comfortably. Maybe I'll never get good enough to improvise dancing with a guitarist and singer. But looking back, I am thrilled how far I've come.
[1] Since few people here will be familiar with flamenco, here is a clip of Spanish dancer Marco Flores performing a Seguiriya: https://youtu.be/ajVmaj6Z93o?t=397.
Notice how Marco beats out what appears a chaotic rhythm with his feet, yet it keeps coming back to the strict beat clapped out by the singer. If you try to follow along, note the rhythm here has a 5-beat bar: 1-and, 2-and, 3-and-a, 4-and-a, 5-and. So the 1, 2 and 5 are short, and 3 and 4 are long.
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I would guess the main driver for brain stimulation is the coordinative aspect of dealing with many motor skills over different body parts doing different things, while also coordinating the rhythms and cadence of music in your mind. So the more coordinated the movement (ballet, flamenco), the more stimulated. There's also the component of memorizing sequences. In this respect, yoga is also very fruitful. Many tradit…
> "I would guess the main driver for brain stimulation is the coordinative aspect of dealing with many motor skills over different body parts doing different things, while also coordinating the rhythms and cadence of music in your mind. So the more coordinated the movement (ballet, flamenco), the more stimulated." Interesting that you mention flamenco [1]. I started dancing flamenco 8 years ago, at age 42. I am a lat…
Also, some versions of the opera Carmen has almost an hour-long flamenco part, it's worth watching, a good french opera.
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Similarly, contradance (though that's much more limited to the US).
What is contradance? Do you have any experience you’d like to share?
Contradance is where I tend to start totally new dancers. The community tends to be extremely welcoming. Most dances have an expectation that experienced dancers will spend at least part of the evening dancing with newcomers and trying to get them up to speed and comfortable. Once they've got the sense of weight and motion, then you can drag them off to swing, ballroom, or whatever else, but it really is an incredibly effective setting for instilling some fundamentals and confidence.
It's also interesting because you can go from Virginia to Washington state and walk into a contradance and wonder if you traveled at all.
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I would disagree, dance requires an intimate letting go, while sports is a more mechanical shutting down. Dance is a sort of trance, and requires alot of letting go. Sports has a goal, has focus, its very “in the head” (exceptions do exist ala japanese arts, martial arts comes close but not as it is largely implemented in the west.) Not saying no brain plasticity work takes place, but dance has an active emotional el…
Dance is a sort of trance, and requires alot of letting go I know what you mean, also when you talk about that certain tenderness, I have experienced that, and I can get that same thing out of sports like climbing/bmx/snowboarding. Take climbing: slowly reaching for a difficult hold you've never touched before, where you carefully lay your fingers on it, just touching it at first to make sure it'll actually hold you…
Having studied a little modern dance, being a sw dev and bicycler, lifelong musician, and a pilates fanatic -- dance absolutely has more for the brain/body/emotional/spiritual connection. It's kind of the whole deal and it is unique this way.
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Someone else already pointed out that this is actually quite significant, just the time might have been too short but there is clear indication something is there. For me the key question is: what is the key ingredient (or the right mix of ingredients)? E.g. is it having a programme to follow (having aims/duties is known to increase longevity, see the famous 'plant study')? Or rhythmic fluid movements (so like tai ch…
May I ask what the “plant study” you are referring to is?
https://www.coyneoftherealm.com/2014/11/05/re-examining-elle...
Langer gave houseplants to two groups of nursing-home residents. She told one group that they were responsible for keeping the plant alive and that they could also make choices about their schedules during the day. She told the other group that the staff would care for the plants, and they were not given any choice in their schedules. Eighteen months later, twice as many subjects in the plant-caring, decision-making group were still alive than in the control group. To Langer, this was evidence that the biomedical model of the day — that the mind and the body are on separate tracks — was wrongheaded.
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What is contradance? Do you have any experience you’d like to share?
The English country dance tradition in the USA evolved into contradance (corruption of "country dance"). It diverged in the 18th century when English country dances were almost entirely longways dances, so there are only a few squares formations left, almost vestigial. Then in English the whole explosion when the quadrille arrived from France and began hybridizing with English country dance happened, and then the wal…