The Persistent Work of Play
Some musings on the importance of play through dance
Hi everyone. Chuy here coming at you from Sonoma County after a very full day visiting with high school students at Sonoma Academy. (The speech from last weeks post went great!) This is the day after another very full day of air travel with a two year old. Granted said two year old did amazing on the multiple flights but that doesn’t alleviate how very draining it was. Which is all to say that I’m pulling a post from my personal archives for you today. The setup: years back I was part of a fledgling modern dance academy in Iowa City called New Territory Dance. I have nothing but fond memories of my time dancing under the helm of our Artistic Directory Analia Alegre-Femenias Weber. Part of my time with New Territory was writing a blog on various musings related to modern dance. Imagine that! Blog writing before Substack and the like. Anyways this post is one I’m particularly proud of from that blog. Whose subject matter I’ve been thinking about lately with the aformentioned toddler. It’s this whole issue of play when it comes to the things we pursue. Check it out after the jump. And just because I know it’s brewing….(funny how that happens regarding the acriminous things in our lives) stay tuned next week for the latest installment of Make it Make Sense.
While thinking about dance in relation to the other endeavors I pursue, the age old question of why cropped up. Why do we, day after day, pursue these things we do, dance included? The answer I came to was passion through “serious play.” That is, our persistence for this endeavor is cultivated by focused and authentic exploration in the moment.
I recently started teaching a summer dance class of 5 year old boys and was reminded of the differences between adult and child classes. An obvious difference is the need to make concepts simpler and more relatable. “Now we crouch down like ninjas before being as still as statues!” Another find is that kids seem more in tune with the important idea of creative play than their older counterparts. Compared to untrained adults, kids are more willing to explore a given dance concept, rather than wait to be shown exact variations of a movement. This makes sense; the play of children can be pure, without the pretension and self consciousness that comes with age. This willingness to play and explore is a valuable tool for any endeavor and it reminds me of one of my favorite photographs; “Java” by Gotthard Schuh.
In the simplest sense, this is a picture of a kid playing marbles in the street. But look closely at the concentration in the boy’s gaze, the technique in how he holds the marbles in his hands, or how he inadvertently creates dynamic lines through his distal ends. This picture could just as easily be a captured moment of a street dancer exploring some improv exercises before a crowd.
The playful yet focused state of mind in this photo is something that dancers constantly try to recreate, New Territory Dance included. Often to start off rehearsals, our Artistic Director Analia will ask us to make a couple of improv passes across the floor with verbal cues, like “Imagine the liquid in your body pooling in one your limbs, then transferring that liquid throughout your body in relation to the floor”. An improv cue I appropriated and now teach in my Hip Hop classes is “Imagine that you have headlights shining from your hips and a laser beaming out of the crown of your head, now try to shine a light on every corner of the room.” These small cues and exercises are reproductions of what children often do organically within their play.
Which is not to say that this playful mindset has to be inherently silly or even jovial. It can be; I can’t count all the times I’ve gut laughed at the craziness those improvs created. But many times it’s the opposite, like the concentration of a calculating chess player deep in a match, or the intensity of a powerlifter before they attempt a personal record.
In fact, it was in the world of weightlifting that I met one of the biggest advocates for “serious play.” I first learned proper weightlifting technique and culture from Phil Johnson. Phil was the strength coordinator for the West Branch high school football program, and an overall great strength coach. He has also done hefty research on play in relation to learning.
A video of Phil he uploaded. It’s significant for our purposes that it’s simply titled “Playin around!”
I distinctly remember conversations with Phil about the importance of play on a person’s development, from childhood play through “playing” in the gym. Though the sessions in Phil's gym were incredibly demanding, there was a culture of playfulness in the face of serious work. This atmosphere was supported by Phil’s enthusiasm for the lifts he was showing us. Even if these exercises seemed daunting to someone new to lifting, we would focus and explore the simple concept of “Can you do this?” or “Okay, now try this out!” Similar to how a dancer can look at the studio in a positive light, or how you rarely hear of kids growing tired of recess. We looked at the gym as a place to try out and explore new lifts, rather than this daunting place where we had to work.
Of course, I admit that this has a lot to do with what an individual is passionate for. It’s this passion for the endeavors we pursue that allows for the persistence to meet the demands that said endeavors create. Like how that dancer attentively fine-tunes a combination on the 100th pass of a dance they’ve been rehearsing for 3 months. Or how a powerlifter wants to try a lift he has failed twice prior. To someone who doesn’t love these endeavors, these examples could be drudgery, but to those passionate for it, these moments become examples of playful focus. In those moments it’s the fact that we want to authentically play that puts us in the same mindset as the kids moving like ninjas in a dance studio, or the kid in Java inadvertently hitting a dance pose while enamored in a game of marbles. In these moments we forget about the responsibilities and demands of our day to day and find persistence to play around and follow those things we love.