#8: The three ingredients of beauty (+ quick answers to the manosphere)
Hello dancer!
Quick intro, lots of mansplaining to do today. Just wanted to say that I saw the Louis Theroux documentary on the Manosphere, and I wanted to add my two cents. Here goes: toxic masculinity is gaining power. People like Andrew Tate and other insane manosphere figures are of great influence on this. But they are not the cause of this miserable situation. They are merely the product of the highly toxic environment that is Instagram/TikTok.
My two answers to this:
1. Children are not so vulnerable to this nonsense when they grow up with caring and attentive adults - so be there for a child in real life and you are a miracle!
2. These platforms reward extremism and high emotional intensity. We should (gradually) stop supporting them. Let's all start news letters 💃
To the content!
Three ingredients of beauty
Ecstatic Dance has no dance steps. It isn't a music genre, or a way of dancing. There is almost no technical guidance for how to dance at an ecstatic dance. It is just not about how it looks, but about enjoying movement and music. No right or wrong!
But there is a paradox: because of course there is a certain difference in quality between how dancers move around on dancefloors. Professional dancers and other movement artists get alot of respect in the world of ecstatic dance, and rightly so. Some people just move so beautifully!
So what is this tension between 'everything is good enough' on the one hand and 'wow but this person is just so very good'?
Bear with me and let me mansplain my theoretical framework for beauty in dance.
Technique
Beauty in dance grows out of three ingredients. The first one is technique. If you learn salsa, you know how to move your body properly to salsa. Quick, quick, slow, from the hips. Or maybe you learn streetdance, classical or modern ballet. Technique helps you broaden the range of what your body can do within genres of music. It is the thing that separates professional dancers from the rest of the dance clique.
(Attentive) Pleasure
You need another thing though, and it is more important to beauty than technique, which is pleasure! The world of pro-dancing can be very competitive and results driven. And when technique becomes the sole thing that is important, the pleasure gets kicked out of the experience. Enter Ecstatic Dance - the dancefloor where there is no judgment, just freedom of movement. I have met quite a few professional dancers who came to ecstatic dance and rediscovered their sense of pleasure here.
For pleasure, you don’t need any technique at all: you just start moving in a way that feels good in the moment. The phrase ‘beauty comes from the inside’ is a very true cliché in this sense: someone who is authentically enjoying themself, is already beautiful. Not caring about technique might be key here. It does require that you remain attentive: are you genuinely enjoying yourself or -and this is a real pitfall- are you acting as if you are?
Ingredient 3: Relation
There is a third secret part to dancing beauty however, and that is relation: someone needs to open up to beauty for it to come to life. It has to do with having an open mind. If you are closed off to yourself, like when you are judgmental, then there is no true relation with yourself, and it is hard to find genuine enjoyment. But if you open up and find acceptance within, then you can enjoy easier!
It is the same for others: if someone else is not seeing your beauty, then that is on them. They are just not being open to who you are. But if someone genuinely opens up to you, the experience of beauty becomes shared. This is -I think- a very rewarding experience, one of the most beautiful and intimate experiences in dancing -the connection becomes real, and beauty is being shared.
Technique, in the end, does not really matter for beauty: as long as someone is enjoying themselves in the movement, and someone opens up to it, the beauty is there. Technique often makes you more judgmental, and close you off from relational beauty. I think this is why some professional dancers rediscover their pleasure in dance at Ecstatic Dance: they learn to let go of their judgment and open up to the beauty of simple enjoyment.
The purpose of technique
What then, is the purpose of technique? Well, I think technique helps us experience more pleasure, and deeper relation.
As to more pleasure: let's take salsa as an example. Part of the technique of salsa is that you learn to move from the hips. This is not just because it looks better from the outside, it also makes the dance alot more pleasurable! Many Western European dancers could benefit greatly from hip movements, as I find often more pleasurable than starting your movement in the shoulders or knees ;).
As for deepening relations: technique can also help us with learning how to express certain emotions. It is relatively easy for most people to do a happy dance and bounce up and down to tribal vibal trommeldans. Expressing complex emotions like grief though, is harder. You can learn a bit how to bring these things into expression through movement by taking dance classes. Although, in the end, the technique is there to help you lose the technique and be more present with yourself I guess.
In short: technique, attentive pleasure and relation are three things that make up beauty.
Next time you are at a dance, I want to challenge you to make an effort in opening up to another dancer, letting go of your own judgments and just move with the person. See if you can find some pleasure in that ;).
So, a bit heady, you can also forget all about my theoretical framework and I will see you at the next dance!
Track of the Month
A dancer sent me this track. Thank you dancer! I have been playing it in almost every set. It gives space for resting, but also invites intimacy and playfulness. I skip the ending though, somehow electric guitars always mess up the vibe at an Ecstatic Dance. But anyway, for your enjoyment: Ibrahim Maalouf!
Upcoming Events
March
28 Ecstatic Dance Rotterdam
April
4 Ecstatic Dance Nijmegen
10 Ecstatic Dance, Bar Beton, Utrecht
14 Ecstatic Dance, Loods 12, Amsterdam
16 PLAY! Ecstatic Dance Zwolle
23 Ecstatic Dance Den Haag
25 PLAY Festival: Leve jezelf! (NACHTPAPEGAAI SCHUURFEEST PARTY OMG)
Download this set
Utrecht, we were on fire! The room was full of new and seasoned dancers, and all of you were with me until the very end. So much engagement! Well let me tell you now, you gotta hold that sucker down and enjoy this bombastic set.
DOWNLOAD HERE
