| layout | title | permalink |
|---|---|---|
page |
About this Blog |
/about/ |
Hi, my name is Gregory Dyke. I started dancing and playing music back in 2006 (Irish music, Breton and other bal folk dancing), after over 20 years of not being musical or comfortable with the idea of dancing. Since then, I've come a long way (I mean, considering I started from rock bottom) and acquired and refined a bunch of opinions (among them, if I can do what I do, anyone can). I started Lindy Hop and Contradance in 2010, Blues in 2011, Balboa and Tango in 2012. I also, with quite a lot of help, overcame my tone deafness and got into singing as well as playing music for bal folk. I've also started teaching (workshops on partnering in French dance, Bourrée from Auvergne, French dance in general, and more recently, beginner Blues and Lindy).
I think a bunch of commonly accepted ideas about music and dancing (and teaching them) are messed up and this blog, along with my teaching, are an effort to set my ideas straight and help them spread (fortunately, my ideas have often already occured to others and I'm just trying to connect everything together). Being a jack of many dances, I don't do very well on the mastery level, but it does give me an insight into what dances have in common, what might be universal and what is specific to individual dances. In a very shortened form, I would claim that middle class adoption of dance and music as a recreational passtime and professional activity are at the root cause of the messed up ideas I see, leading us to be overly restrictive when laying out the "right" and "wrong" ways of doing things, to believe that learning trajectories should start with beginners mastering the basics, and to assume good technique has an intrinsic value.
I value using social music and dance as a means to give people a voice with which to express themselves artistically within a community without necessarily having to resort to performance and competitions. I believe that social dance is fundamentally about expression in partnership between two (or more) dancers and the music and I think that from day one, dancers should be encouraged to use their developing skills to do just that.
Oh yeah: Movement creates connection! "You think connection creates movement? That's crazy" -- Barry "The Man" Douglas.