Proprioception: perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body
Why is proprioception needed?
Being aware of how the body moves through space helps us improve our balance, and allows us to tune into our bodies and enjoy how we move. It is a sensuous pleasure, if a geeky one in my case. I remember enjoying weeding the garden or going for a walk, or using my spinning wheel as I started to learn about kinesthetic awareness. Everyday movement is the most important, as we want to remain mobile for our entire lives, and moving correctly allows us to stay healthy and uninjured.
In tango, the many parts of the body need to move more precisely than in just walking down the street. There are two more feet in close proximity to yours, and an entire body in your personal space (and on a crowded dance floor, perhaps several couples in your personal space!). To dance tango well, you must tune into your body on a deeper level to achieve mastery of the dance. Join us for group classes this week to work on your own body awareness!
Kinesthetic IQ
There are many ways to be intelligent. Howard Gardner defined multiple intelligences, including body/kinesthetic intelligence. That means that you can be gifted, normal, or struggling with body awareness in the same way you can be good, normal or clueless about mathematics! Not all of us are naturally born with a lot of awareness of how our body moves through space.
Sometimes, deficits in other abilities help to increase kinesthetic awareness. For me, having almost zero ability to see spatially (I have almost no stereo-vision) helped me because I had to FEEL where I was: my eyes could not tell me. I struggled through required sports until college, at which point I took ballroom dance as a required PE class to finish off having to do physical exercise (did I mention I never dreamed of teaching dance?). I found I could remember movement faster than other people, and that I was more aware of my body than most people from paying attention to the FEELING of where I was in space to avoid injury.
IQ is not everything
Years later, I see how thinking I was bad at movement stopped me from trying to dance before that; I assumed I would be bad at it. If we all stopped trying because we were initially bad at something—we would never make it in life. As in career, university, a sport—perseverance is more important than initial talent in most cases.
Only twice in my life have I thought “Oh no! I can’t teach that person to dance!” out of over 5000+ students. In both cases, those people stuck to learning tango for years, working much harder than anyone else, and achieved a solid, intermediate level of dancing. Their dedication and perseverance were head and shoulders above anyone else’s in my entire teaching career.
If you are willing to work hard, you can move from challenged to average—or above—in your body smarts!
Class topics this week:
Tuesday March 8th @ 6:30 PM: Proprioception 1: Tuning into transitions
Friday March 12th @ noon: Proprioception 2: Integrating thinking and feeling in the dance
Please join us!