In 2016 I read a book that changed my life. It’s called “What A Body Can Do” and it’s by non-binary author Ben Spatz. It put into words a lot of the feelings I was having about technique, about language, about gender, and about how I move through the world as a queer, neurospicy, often very odd human being.
“Technique” is a word that a lot of people think they understand, but don’t. They say things like “that dance had a lot of technique” or “She has a lot of feeling when she dances, but she’s not very technical.” What I hope that people will understand by the end of this blog post is that neither of these statements quite make sense, and that by finding better language for what we see, as opposed to the shortcut of “technique,” we will actually be doing a service to our dancing, and to our communities. This blog post is about how.
What is Technique?
“Technique” in the way it’s commonly used, is a hierarchical system of values. When people say a dance is “technical” they often mean that it looks like ballet, or a white-codified form. Historically, ethnographers and dance critics framed a binary opposition between the trained “technique” of white concert and social dancers, and the “natural” or “instinctive” dancing of People of Color. This binary was used to justify paying Black dancers lower wages, exclude them from recognition as artists, and associate Black vernacular dances in particular with racist ideas about comparative morality. When people say that a dance “has a lot of technique” they usually mean that they can see an upright posture, elongated lines, attention to agreed-upon details of articulation, and other movement elements that tend towards the white, concert end of the movement spectrum.
One way I share this with my students is through this thought experiment, which doesn’t work perfectly in text, but which I invite you to try for yourself: stand up, shake your body out, and get into your best dance posture.
Ready? Go!
Most people when they try this will stand up straight, weight shifted slightly forward over the toes, arms hanging loosely down from the shoulders. Depending on their dance history they may or may not turn out their legs. This is a very useful posture for… some types of dancing. It’s completely the wrong posture for tap, for Blues, and for many other forms of dancing. It’s ok, but not correct, for many others. It attempts to be an approximation between several different dances that winds up failing all of them by not being specific enough. This happens because people hear “dance posture” and make assumptions about what “dance” means, just like they hear the word “technique” and assume that technique in general, and dance specific technique, are the same kind of thing.
So What Should We Do Differently?
Since I started teaching dance history and analysis (oh gosh, over ten years ago now), the consensus has been that we need to push back against this idea of technique as one way of moving, and instead think more about technique as a system for getting things done. This is where Spatz’s work was transformative for me, along with a bunch of other writers like Aimee Merideth Cox, Fiona Buckland, even Bessel van der Kolk (have you worked out that I’m a nerd yet?).
Here’s an experiment for Spatz. Pick a balance and try to hold it. Feel your body making micro-adjustments to try and keep you in place. If you are standing on one leg, feel whether you shift more to the center of your foot or to the inside. How much do you need to relax or tone up your core? These adjustments will be different for every single body, and every single change of position, but they are experiments in technique that you can build for yourself and learn to replicate more fluidly, and transfer between different balance points as you develop your expertise. You might be able to share them with someone else, if they asked you how to balance well.
Spatz also thinks about gender: what are the different ways you try and live your gender in society every day? How do you show the word that you are your own particular, individual flavor of boy, or girl, or non-binary person, or something else? How does what you show change from day to day and context to context? Can you think of a moment where you had to learn a new technique for your gender because an old one didn’t work for you? These techniques are not for “gender” in general, just as technique is not for “dance” in general. They are specific and personal ways that you can use your body (and words) to do the things you want to do, live your life the way you live it, and move the way you want to move.
Wait, So Does Dance Have Technique?
One way that dances become recognizable is to develop a pool of techniques in common that can be shared, taught, and aspired to. The difference is that with this new understanding, no one dance has any more, or less, technique than any other, and no technical system is more or less valuable. While dancers may have more or less expertise in the particular techniques they want to adopt and use, it doesn’t mean that the techniques themselves aren’t there. Techniques for creating upright posture, elongated lines, defiance of gravity etc. still exist, but so do techniques of improvisation, groundedness, mess, connection, and individual adaptation. Techniques of moving to the music and techniques of allowing the music to become disconnected from your own sense of bodily time. We can look at dances not to see if they are “technical” but to discover what technique is doing inside of them to create the identity of the dance and the community that practices it.
I practice dances that fall over the stereotypical technique spectrum. I do my gender in predictable and unpredictable ways. What I would like people to realize – because I am a nerd, after all – is that my choices in these things are usually deliberate, and usually link back to values I care about deeply. If you dismiss what I am doing as “untechnical,” you’re probably missing information about who I am, and what I care about. If you dismiss a dance, or dancer, as “untechnical,” you might not have the tools or cultural education to identify the techniques they have chosen, and why they are in use.
As many of us take a break from dancing before the New Year, I invite you to consider what techniques you have particularly chosen as reflections of who you are and what you care about, and how you could bring them more into your dancing. How could you gain a better recognition of the choices and techniques of others, and how doing so bring us together in better conversations about the dances we love.
the headtail connection 