Naomi Uyama is kind of the business

A little while ago I wrote a review of this album by Naomi Uyama and her Handsome Devils. I was all set to love this album – a fabulous band, a band leader who really knows dance music. But I didn’t. I didn’t like Naomi’s voice, and couldn’t get past it.

So I left it, and didn’t listen to it very many more times. Just enough times to actually be sure I didn’t love it.

But every time I’ve DJed since then, I’ve played this song: Take it easy greasy.

Every. Single. Set. And each time I’ve played it, I’ve found something new and good in it. There’s a moment somewhere in the first third that I noticed when I first DJed it at the MLX late night. I suddenly realised: Naomi has a rhythmic sensibility that only a very good jazz dancer could bring to a song, and it’s quite fantastic. The rest of the band really do pay attention to her, so her voice is really treated as a part of the band. I still don’t really like her voice, but I do like the way she sings. If I think of her as a part of the rhythm section, it’s all good.

I need to repeat the points I made in that first review of the album: Naomi is a really, really good band leader. And being a good band leader is what makes a band great for dancing. Someone has to give this whole collective improvisation enterprise some direction, some structure. And Naomi is one seriously hardcore arse kicker.
It’s also worth noting that she arranged some of the songs on the album. So she’s not just singing songs. She’s managing a band off-stage, she’s arranging the music, she’s leading them on stage (ie keeping that shit together in the moment), she’s selecting the right songs for the audience, AND she’s singing.

Oh, and did you know she can dance? She’s kind of ok at that.

You can smell the drive and focus on her.

process not product in learning dance

Valuing the process rather than the product
I’ve been thinking about this again.
Two of my teaching buddies like to quote Ramona: “As soon as you ‘have’ a step, it’s dead.” The implication being that you should never be ‘done’ with a step, never have ‘learnt’ it.

We use this idea in our approach to our own learning and workshop attendance. You don’t go to a workshop to ‘learn the content’, tick it off your list, add it to your repertoire and so kill it dead. You go to workshops for all sorts of reasons. To work with that teacher. To see how they teach. To be with that group of people, learning with them. Most importantly, to participate in that class, to feel how that teacher manages a class, and to experience that class in that particular moment.

When you approach workshop weekends like this, suddenly every weekend is very exciting, and you never come out of workshops bored or frustrated. Beginners or introductory classes become particularly interesting. Because teaching beginners is the hardest thing in the world. Which is why I don’t understand why people have their least experienced teachers teach beginners.

The content becomes just one part of the learning process: you learn about how to be in a class, you learn about how that teacher manages a class, you learn about how the coincidental grouping of people in that moment create a particular, fleeting learning environment. It’s quite wonderful. It can also be quite confronting, because each time you go into a class, you have to be open, and assuming that you know nothing. You have to be really ready to learn, and to try to set aside what you ‘think’ you know.
To me, this seems the logical extension of a rhythm-based learning or teaching or dancing process. You treat each class as though you were sitting in with a band. Everyone in that band has a heap of useful skills, but they may not all blend perfectly at once. But you have to make the music together, so you have to make it work. So you have to come in determined to work with people, and open. Very open. You have to be ready to change the way you do things. To have your opinions changed. And that can be so confronting for someone who’s been dancing for years and years.

This is also a lot like Frankie’s approach to social dancing: you are in love with that person for 3 minutes. They are the queen or king of your world. So be there, be present. Whether they are the best dancer in the world, a poop person, a wonderful person, a really physically frail person, a brilliant conversationalist. Whatever it is that they are, you work with them to make a new dance. And you have to be prepared to be something, yourself.
I don’t mean this in a condescending tone: it’s not like you approach a dance with a total beginner or a ‘terrible dancer’ as though you are the best dancer ever and you have to ‘make it work’ with that person. That’s a terrible way to approach partner dancing. There’s a very good chance that you actually suck. Your attitude certainly does. Total beginners have something you don’t have, and will never have again: they have that moment where dance is totally NEW and fantastic for the very first time. It’ll never be like this again. You could only dream of feeling dancing like this again. So pay attention, they’ll teach you how to be right there in the dance.
More importantly, this is a partner dance. You are both working together.

I think this is why I’m so fond of multi-level partner classes. They’re really hard to teach. And they require your complete attention. You have to be there.

So classes and learning can’t just be a matter of ‘collecting’ all the moves. You have to approach dancing, all the time, as though you haven’t gotten to the bottom of it yet. You have to keep looking, because you won’t find everything in a step or a song or a sequence in just one through.

My favourite example is in learning a routine. Memorising the steps is just the first step. It’s only then that you can really start working on the dancing. And you realise you have to actually start all over again, because by ‘learning’ the step and fixing it in your memory, you’ve killed it dead.

Just fuck that shit off

Hey yo. You can be fat and happy. Once you turn 40, you can do whatever you like because you are pretty much invisible. So you can be such a heinous bitch, you can eat ALL the best food, you can tell the worst jokes, you can laugh your arse off at serious young men (because goddess knows you’ve finally figured their shit out), you can exercise like a crazy person and revel in the sweat and the muscle and the endorphines, you can stay up ALL NIGHT LONG, you can go to bed at 9pm with a book and a box of chocolates, you can wear whatever sort of swimming costume you like, because no one is looking at you any more, you can swear such dirty swears, you can sit at a table in a restaurant with your friends ALL DAY and drink only cups of tea and no one will give a shit.
And also you can do this when you are less than 40. I mean, fuck, who gives a shit, right? Just fucking do this shit. And if anyone tries to tell you shouldn’t ‘let yourself go’ or even talks about carbs as anything other than energy for all the arse kicking you have to do that day, say, “Fuck that shit! Let’s talk about something fun!” And if your girl friends try to have a conversation near you about how fat they are and how they are really ‘bad’ for eating that one thing, interrupt rudely and say “Hey, bitches! Come on! Let’s go to the art gallery and strike poses like those chicks in the old paintings!”

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You know you can just go and get what you want. You can just get it.

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Fuck that shit.

Total bullshit

All you need to know about the ‘learning styles’ myth.

Two other myths that shit me: ‘right brain/left brain’ and ‘muscle memory’. The second is particularly irritating. Your muscles do not have memory. They are _muscles_, not brains. So when you are learning a new dance step (for example) you don’t repeat it a heap of times to fix it in your ‘muscle memory’. You repeat it a million times* to improve fitness, balance (core stability), even to make your muscles stronger. But they don’t remember anything. Your brain does that.

*We could also argue that repeating anything a million times without some degree of mindfulness** isn’t terribly helpful. Like those jocks in the gym using momentum to lug weights into the air, rather than recruiting the right muscles, you can do something a million times and still not be achieving your goals.

**By mindfulness, of course, I mean an awareness of what you are doing with your body in that moment. And by awareness I mean knowledgeable awareness.

walklondon tube map

The walklondon walking subway map, a project created by Joe Watson and Aryven Arasen for Walkunlimited, is pretty interesting.

Walking-Tube-Map

It maps the walking time between London tube spots, and notes the landmarks that you’d see on that walking route. The goal was to get people walking instead of freaking out during a tube strike.
It’s interesting because it shows just how dependent people are on set routes in their commute, particularly people who use public transport or drive. I clearly remember my first trip to London, realising that it was quicker and more interesting to walk between stops instead of catching trains.

Links:
#walklondon: a map to help Londoners avoid Tube Strike chaos By Aryven Arasen

#walklondon by aryjoe creatives

I guess, that while one of the original intentions of this project was to ameliorate the effects of a tube strike a consequence would also be increasing people’s incidental fitness.

content But I’m more interested in it as an aspect of the everyday lived spaces, in the way they’re talked about by people like William H. Whyte in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Whyte is kind of old hat these days, and has been superseded by more recent, more nuanced work, but this little film ‘The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1988)/ is pretty interesting if you’ve not come across this sort of work before:

I’m very interested in the ordinary ways people use public space, and I’ve been really keen to do some sort of project using sound, music, video and images in a map of urban jazz cultures. But you know, not enough time, and not enough money to get access to the right material.