To Learn, to Forget

Have you ever found a way you can maintain good technique?

Technique is a large umbrella to talk about, but one that is fundamental to a dancer. It is the basis of movement – navigating it in a way that uses energy efficiently and produces anatomically correct alignment to reduce the risk of injury. Good technique will aid you to succeed, draw the best results from your body and prolong healthy muscle usage.

Finding it – well, it’s a matter of training, having a good teacher to teach you and then guide you to maintain it.

Maintaining it is what I want to talk about today.

Something that stayed with me from my “A Window to the World of Classical Ballet” days is the idea that good technique is something that should be thoroughly learned and then effortlessly forgotten. It’s something you will spend hours slaving over to get “just right”, but then what?

Reading a blog post by Gretchin Rubin, “Secrets Revealed: A Simple (Lazy?) Way to Solve a Difficult Problem”, she mentions a notion pinpointed by Bertrand Russell in his book “The Conquest of Happiness”:

I have found…that, if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic, the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity—the greatest intensity of which I am capable—for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered this technique, I used to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits.

Thinking about it, this is how I’ve come to approach dance technique. I’ll spend weeks, months, sometimes years perfecting a certain technique only to leave it be… let it fall to the subterranean depths of my brain where it can simmer and work. Not actively thinking about it creates something more effortless about the movement and allows the technique to be a building block for others.

The difficult part is knowing when this “learned” technique needs tweaking.

I find the same principle can be used in learning choreography. Learn, learn, learn and then…leave it. I find when I come back to it, even if I haven’t repeated the phrase, it’s consolidated itself in my muscle memory and is much easier to recall.

Sometimes the body really is magic.

How do you approach learning technique?