Movement Creates Connection

I first encountered the idea that movement creates connection at a workshop with Brooks and Joanna . They started off asking how leads got their follows to move, and most of us said that first we had to connect or create a connection. They then suggested that rather than thinking of connection as creating movement, we should think of movement as creating connection. They then stopped blathering on about it (a really impressive skill in dance teachers) and taught us a series of moves with a lot of flow: the movement of one move transferring naturally into the connection to prepare the next. I think they barely referred to this idea again for the whole class, but it really stuck with me. It felt a lot like energy in physics: connection and movement transforming into each other, much like a pendulum’s potential and kinetic energy.

This convinced me that connection and energy were kind of chicken and egg, with it not making sense to figure out which comes first : since once they exist, they flow into each other it shouldn’t really matter, right? But a few months later in a class with Barry and Brenda, Barry said something like “You think connection creates movement? That’s crazy!”. That also really stuck with me.

If you think of a connection as unrealized movement and consider the beginning of a dance, where neither movement nor connection exists, it makes sense that to create connection, you need to add movement (e.g. move away from your partner). The same applies if you want to add to or subtract from the current amount of movement (or connection) in the dance: change your movement and the connection will follow.

Thinking of connection and movement as two sides of the same coin, and more specifically, of connection as being created by movement has a bunch of nice consequences (in particular, the answer to “how do I lead this?” and “why is this not working?” is almost always: “movement creates connection”):¹

• Lead from your whole body. Want to create connection? Move!
• As a lead, don’t dance your follow, dance yourself. This will create connection and the follow will respond creating movement. Which will create more connection for you to respond to.
• Connection is not something that needs input on the lead or follows part to be maintained. Just let all your movement convert into connection and all your connection convert into movement.
• Movement, connection, movement. Their is no “communicate what you intend to the follow” or “comprehend what the lead intended” in this cycle.²
• The follow is not a puppet. The cycle does not go: “create connection, move the follow” but “move yourself, create connection, the follow moves in response to the connection”.³
• There is quite a lot of freedom to be found in the move-connect-move-connect cycle, particularly for the follow. Any initial move and connection release is typically the lead’s, but subsequently, the follow has a margin of choice in the creation of connection, and particularly in the movement that derives from that connection.
• Freeing up the cycle even more (thinking blues here), and making connection just the manifestation of movement, the movement that results will be related to the previous connection, but will offer an even wider range of choices to both lead and follow. In this paradigm, movement does create connection, but connection no longer results in an easily predictable movement.

In other words, movement creates connection empowers both leads and follows to have more fun. Which is why it’s the title of my blog.