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Last night, thanks to the mysterious appearance of the HBO channels on our cable lineup, I finally watched Black Swan.  I approached the movie with extreme trepidation: because I get creeped out really easily and I don’t like to be startled, several people had told me I shouldn’t see it at all.  But I had Daniel next to me making fake-scary faces, waving his fingers, and going “WOOOO, it’s just a MOOOOOOVIE,” so I went for it.

At the end of the movie I posted on Facebook: “Saw Black Swan finally.  Kind of want to slap Darren Aronofsky upside the head.”

Here’s the thing: I am entirely willing to believe that the world of ballet has the potential to attract and/or create psychologically damaged people.  (It helps that I was obsessed with Gelsey Kirkland’s autobio Dancing on my Grave  when I was in high school.)  Stage mothers living out their frustrated dance dreams through their daughters are real.  Emotionally and sexually manipulative company directors are real (depending on the view one takes of George Balanchine, who by some accounts was the model for the character of Thomas in Black Swan).  The consuming desire for perfection is real.  The anxiety about career longevity and advancement is real.  The bloody toes are real.  Even the characterization of Nina, simultaneously sheltered and damaged, coddled and neglected, rang somewhat true for me: a promising dancer who commits to a company at age 18 is making a decision she probably isn’t developmentally prepared to make and ends up coming of age in a hothouse atmosphere where her usefulness to society is very narrowly defined (see also Sergei what’s-his-name, 21, who just left the Royal Ballet to run a tattoo studio or something).

So my beef with Black Swan is not with its portrayal of the world of professional dance.  My beef with Black Swan is with its cinematic style.  Doesn’t Aronofsky trust his audience?  The beginning of the movie was so in medias res that I actually thought we had missed the first 15 minutes or something.  We have no indication of how Nina became the psychological train wreck that she is (potentially a more interesting story, IMO).  The movie starts with the melodrama-o-meter dialed up to 11 and then keeps cranking on it all the way to the end.  Stop it with the claustrophobic interiors, the grey-on-grey-on-grey color scheme, the relentless distastefulness of the characters.  Couldn’t I just have spent the whole movie with Mila Kunis’s character?  She seemed like a cool girl.

I wasn’t bothered by the creepiness/grossness per se, or the sexuality–I am on record as loving the movie The Libertine, one of the most explicit and nastiest movies I’ve ever seen.  But, again, memo to director: WE GET IT.  Girlfriend needs therapy.  And her own apartment and a normal boyfriend and some friends and maybe a protein shake.  Nor do I mind Natalie Portman having used dance doubles and then kept quiet about it.  High-level ballet training is a 15- or 20-year pursuit requiring that one start with a fairly specific body type.  Hardcore dance nerds would notice that she was using a double (“There’s no way that’s really her”) and we’d have noticed if she hadn’t (“That was terrible; she should have had a double”).  The rest of the world probably wouldn’t care, and the awards that she won were for acting, not for developpés. Keeping the use of doubles a secret till after awards season was a dumb decision but probably an administrative one.

While I’ve got you here, though, I have to say that I don’t understand giving those awards for what I felt was largely a one-note performance.  She spent 80% of the movie crying or trying not to cry.  I don’t believe, come to think of it, that such fragility would have survived in the professional dance world as long as her character supposedly did.  Even if you take into account that she hadn’t had a piece of cake in at least 15 years.

The dance world is an insider’s world. I think that’s the reason that ballet movies are always flawed.  Educating an audience and then creating compelling characters and telling an engaging story is a lot to do successfully in two hours.  I credit Black Swan for its ambition but fault it for being headache-inducingly melodramatic (true fact: I had a headache at the end of the film) and, in the end, unoriginal.  I would venture to suggest that the truisms of ballet that I enumerated above are widely enough known to stand as clichés.  And I would happily watch a movie of much greater subtlety and originality in which an insurgent dancer equipped with good mental health, supportive friends, and actual body fat (just a little) successfully pushed aside the punishing atmosphere and mind games of her company, opening the way to its re-creation as a creative juggernaut of positive energy.

But then, I am a Pollyanna.

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Joyce has kindly sent me an article by Richard Powers, dance instructor at Stanford University, that explains the article in the New England Journal of Medicine (abstract here) about dancing and its ability to lower dementia risk.  It makes a lot of sense and, I think, indirectly speaks to the special challenges of partner dancing, which I increasingly find myself talking about in terms of communication and interpretation (Powers calls it “decision-making,” and that fits, too).  Click through to read the article.

Use It or Lose It:  Dancing Makes You Smarter
Richard Powers
For centuries, dance manuals and other writings have lauded the health benefits of dancing, usually as physical exercise.  More recently we’ve seen research on further health benefits of dancing, such as stress reduction and increased serotonin level, with its sense of well-being.
Then most recently we’ve heard of another benefit:  Frequent dancing apparently makes us smarter.  A major study added to the growing evidence that stimulating one’s mind can ward off Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia, much as physical exercise can keep the body fit.  Dancing also increases cognitive acuity at all ages.
You may have heard about the New England Journal of Medicine report on the effects of recreational activities on mental acuity in aging.   Here it is in a nutshell.
The 21-year study of senior citizens, 75 and older, was led by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, funded by the National Institute on Aging, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.  Their method for objectively measuring mental acuity in aging was to monitor rates of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.
The study wanted to see if any physical or cognitive recreational activities influenced mental acuity.  They discovered that some activities had a significant beneficial effect.  Other activities had none.
They studied cognitive activities such as reading books, writing for pleasure, doing crossword puzzles, playing cards and playing musical instruments.  And they studied physical activities like playing tennis or golf, swimming, bicycling, dancing, walking for exercise and doing housework.
One of the surprises of the study was that almost none of the physical activities appeared to offer any protection against dementia.  There can be cardiovascular benefits of course, but the focus of this study was the mind.  There was one important exception:  the only physical activity to offer protection against dementia was frequent dancing.
Reading – 35% reduced risk of dementia
Bicycling and swimming – 0%
Doing crossword puzzles at least four days a week – 47%
Playing golf – 0%
Dancing frequently – 76%.
That was the greatest risk reduction of any activity studied, cognitive or physical.
Quoting Dr. Joseph Coyle, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who wrote an accompanying commentary:
“The cerebral cortex and hippocampus, which are critical to these activities, are remarkably plastic, and they rewire themselves based upon their use.”
And from from the study itself, Dr. Katzman proposed these persons are more resistant to the effects of dementia as a result of having greater cognitive reserve and increased complexity of neuronal synapses.  Like education, participation in some leisure activities lowers the risk of dementia by improving cognitive reserve.
Our brain constantly rewires its neural pathways, as needed.  If it doesn’t need to, then it won’t.
            Aging and memory
When brain cells die and synapses weaken with aging, our nouns go first, like names of people, because there’s only one neural pathway connecting to that stored information.  If the single neural connection to that name fades, we lose access to it.  So as we age, we learn to parallel process, to come up with synonyms to go around these roadblocks.  (Or maybe we don’t learn to do this, and just become a dimmer bulb.)
The key here is Dr. Katzman’s emphasis on the complexity of our neuronal synapses.  More is better.  Do whatever you can to create new neural paths.  The opposite of this is taking the same old well-worn path over and over again, with habitual patterns of thinking and living our lives.
When I was studying the creative process as a grad student at Stanford, I came across the perfect analogy to this:
The more stepping stones there are across the creek,
the easier it is to cross in your own style.
The focus of that aphorism was creative thinking, to find as many alternative paths as possible to a creative solution.  But as we age, parallel processing becomes more critical.  Now it’s no longer a matter of style, it’s a matter of survival — getting across the creek at all.  Randomly dying brain cells are like stepping stones being removed one by one.  Those who had only one well-worn path of stones are completely blocked when some are removed.  But those who spent their lives trying different mental routes each time, creating a myriad of possible paths, still have several paths left.
The Albert Einstein College of Medicine study shows that we need to keep as many of those paths active as we can, while also generating new paths, to maintain the complexity of our neuronal synapses.
            Why dancing?
We immediately ask two questions:
Why is dancing better than other activities for improving mental capabilities?
Does this mean all kinds of dancing, or is one kind of dancing better than another?
That’s where this particular study falls short.  It doesn’t answer these questions as a stand-alone study.  Fortunately, it isn’t a stand-alone study.  It’s one of many studies, over decades, which have shown that we increase our mental capacity by exercising our cognitive processes.  Intelligence: Use it or lose it.  And it’s the other studies which fill in the gaps in this one.  Looking at all of these studies together lets us understand the bigger picture.
Some of this is discussed here (the page you may have just came from) which looks at intelligence in dancing.  The essence of intelligence is making decisions.  And the concluding advice, when it comes to improving your mental acuity, is to involve yourself in activities which require split-second rapid-fire decision making, as opposed to rote memory (retracing the same well-worn paths), or just working on your physical style.
One way to do that is to learn something new.  Not just dancing, but anything new.  Don’t worry about the probability that you’ll never use it in the future.  Take a class to challenge your mind.  It will stimulate the connectivity of your brain by generating the need for new pathways.  Difficult and even frustrating classes are better for you, as they will create a greater need for new neural pathways.
Then take a dance class, which can be even better.  Dancing integrates several brain functions at once, increasing your connectivity.  Dancing simultaneously involves kinesthetic, rational, musical and emotional processes.
            What kind of dancing?
Let’s go back to the study:
Bicycling, swimming or playing golf – 0% reduced risk of dementia
But doesn’t golf require rapid-fire decision-making?  No, not if you’re a long-time player.  You made most of the decisions when you first started playing, years ago.  Now the game is mostly refining your technique.  It can be good physical exercise, but the study showed it led to no improvement in mental acuity.
Therefore do the kinds of dance where you must make as many split-second decisions as possible.  That’s key to maintaining true intelligence.
Does any kind of dancing lead to increased mental acuity?  No, not all forms of dancing will produce this benefit.  Not dancing which, like golf or swimming, mostly works on style or retracing the same memorized paths.  The key is the decision-making.  Remember (from this page), Jean Piaget suggested that intelligence is what we use when we don’t already know what to do.
We wish that 25 years ago the Albert Einstein College of Medicine thought of doing side-by-side comparisons of different kinds of dancing, to find out which was better.  But we can figure it out by looking at who they studied: senior citizens 75 and older, beginning in 1980.  Those who danced in that particular population were former Roaring Twenties dancers (back in 1980) and then former Swing Era dancers (today), so the kind of dancing most of them continued to do in retirement was what they began when they were young: freestyle social dancing — basic foxtrot, swing, waltz and maybe some Latin.
I’ve been watching senior citizens dance all of my life, from my parents (who met at a Tommy Dorsey dance), to retirement communities, to the Roseland Ballroom in New York.  I almost never see memorized sequences or patterns on the dance floor.  I mostly see easygoing, fairly simple social dancing — freestyle lead and follow.   But freestyle social dancing isn’t that simple!  It requires a lot of split-second decision-making, in both the lead and follow roles.
I need to digress here:
I want to point out that I’m not demonizing memorized sequence dancing or style-focused pattern-based ballroom dancing.  I sometimes enjoy sequence dances myself, and there are stress-reduction benefits of any kind of dancing, cardiovascular benefits of physical exercise, and even further benefits of feeling connected to a community of dancers.  So all dancing is good.
But when it comes to preserving mental acuity, then some forms are significantly better than others.  When we talk of intelligence (use it or lose it) then the more decision-making we can bring into our dancing, the better.
            Who benefits more, women or men?
In social dancing, the follow role automatically gains a benefit, by making hundreds of split-second decisions as to what to do next.  As I mentioned on this page, women don’t “follow”, they interpret the signals their partners are giving them, and this requires intelligence and decision-making, which is active, not passive.  This benefit is greatly enhanced by dancing with different partners, not always with the same fellow.  With different dance partners, you have to adjust much more and be aware of more variables.  This is great for staying smarter longer.
But men, you can also match her degree of decision-making if you choose to do so.  (1) Really notice your partner and what works best for her.  Notice what is comfortable for her, where she is already going, which moves are successful with her and what aren’t, and constantly adapt your dancing to these observations.  That’s rapid-fire split-second decision making.   (2) Don’t lead the same old patterns the same way each time.  Challenge yourself to try new things.  Make more decisions more often.  Intelligence: use it or lose it.
And men, the huge side-benefit is that your partners will have much more fun dancing with you when you are attentive to their dancing and constantly adjusting for their comfort and continuity of motion.
            Dance often
Finally, remember that this study made another suggestion: do it often.  Seniors who did crossword puzzles four days a week had a measurably lower risk of dementia than those who did the puzzles once a week.  If you can’t take classes or go out dancing four times a week, then dance as much as you can.  More is better.
And do it now, the sooner the better.  It’s essential to start building your cognitive reserve now.  Some day you’ll need as many of those stepping stones across the creek as possible.  Don’t wait — start building them now.

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A tip of the hat to Sadie for sending this video clip my way.  It fits right in with this past Wednesday’s first meeting of the Macon State College Dance Club, for which I have the honor to serve as faculty advisor.  We had an incredible turnout of around 20 students, all full of good ideas and ready to start building a very active organization.  Daniel came to the meeting to receive the semi-official title of “Dance Consultant” and help me teach the student members a few steps in the tango.  Our new tangueros and tangueras made us proud from the start and we can’t wait to see what’s in the future for the club.

You can also check out Macon State Dance Club on Facebook!

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I was driving home from ballet class this evening and caught just the tail end of this story on WHYY’s Radio Times: Shall we dance? Inside the world of competitive ballroom dancing.

When I got in the car the segment was already almost over, so I haven’t heard the whole thing yet.  Somebody listen to it and tell me if it’s good?

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After a lot of “We should” and “Why isn’t there” and “How do we,” I am excited to announce that Macon State College is finally starting a dance club! This project fell into my lap a few weeks ago already half done; the students who wanted to start the club came to me with the initial paperwork done and a Facebook group started. When I went to join the FB group myself, I was excited to see that it already had over 50 members. And while I was loafing on my parents’ couch last week, the club’s most dedicated members were cutting rugs at Mambo’s. So today’s organizational meeting with the officers-to-be was practically just a formality. Our first full-scale meeting (general interest/business meeting with a side of dancing) is on its way to being scheduled for January 25. Stay tuned for more from this great new group, represented today by Neil, Minwoo, Danielle, and Amanda!

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YOU GUYS. In ballet tonight we started learning the Sugar Plum Fairy variation.

For the first few minutes I did not think much about the fact that this experience represents a milestone in my ballet life.  I was busy thinking “Oh, cool, Sugar Plum.  Wonder if I will get to perform this at some point?” (haha, “at some point.”  See what I did there?)  And then I was thinking “Gaaaah, so much pointe work that I’m not sure I can do” and then “I don’t understand these counts and second arabesque and flip around and somehow second arabesque again and WHAT.”

Then we started doing it to the music a couple of times.  I got a sense of where the accents are and thus an idea of how the choreography is supposed to look (note to self: watch some videos).  And I went out to get some water with that music thrumming in my head, remembering how excited I was as a kid to learn that it’s not a HARPSICHORD and it’s not a XYLOPHONE, it’s a celestina.  And it finally struck me (I’m slow to catch on) that at age 38.5, I am learning Sugar Plum for the first time ever.

Holy Nutcracker!

It is very exciting even though I’m not very good at it right now, and I don’t know if I’ll ever do it in front of people, and I’m not sure I am Sugar Plum material in the first place.

Every version of the variation is a little different but this is the one I found that is most like what we are learning:

This is the part I think I’d like, but I’ll have to start working now on lifting my leg up next to my head. Daniel already thinks I’m totally capable of doing the partnered penché move at 2:43:

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Okay, maybe not America’s Funniest but I enjoyed watching this: the clip starts with one of our cha-cha heats. As it turned out, we were not entered for the rumba heat that followed it, but we needed a minute, and a consultation with Vince The Voice, to figure that out.

We reappear around 21:15–go ahead and jump forward because a big part of the clip consists of a long social-dance break to accommodate a judging panel change or some such.

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This video is from the “Dancing for our Heroes” charity ball back in July; I just got a copy on DVD a few weeks ago. Those of you who are Internet stalkers observant viewers will notice common elements between this routine and the one in the previous video. We took this version as a basis when we added the exhibition “tricks” in the more recent version of the routine.  Kind of necessary if, like me, you have not lost stamina or flexibility with age but have entirely lost the ability to remember choreography.  Sigh.

One more thing: the picture is funky for about the first 10 seconds of the video, but it does clear up.  More video soon; stay tuned!

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I’m hoping to post several recent videos over the next few days; here’s the first.  These are the exhibition performances from last Friday at the Atlanta Dance Classic.  We appear at the 12-minute mark but the whole show is worth watching.  Great dancing all over the place!

The Atlanta Classic was a lot of fun; we have to give particular props to our instructor Eddie Ares for stepping in to partner me for a few heats because Daniel wasn’t feeling well.  Tune in again soon for more video from this and other recent events!