West Coast Swing and the Right Hemisphere
It starts out with two people. Usually touching in some way. Slowly the beginning sounds of the music is heard. It propels them to move in tandem with the beat of the song. They feel it within their bodies and together, they start to find this rhythm and a connection to each other. The lead sends the follow for a left-side pass, a classic West Coast Swing move. The lead sets this up with his body and footwork and immediately (if done correctly) the follow follows. The dance has begun.
West Coast Swing is near and dear to my heart because it was one of the first things that I took up after reading The Master and His Emissary. I decided that it was imperative that I do something that was an experience. Something implicit, something belonging to the present moment. I wanted to put more “right hemisphere” into my life — to see what that feels like and where it could take me. I’m so glad I did because it has become one of the most fun, stimulating, and exciting parts of my life. You know, sometimes when you decide to do something and it doesn’t take much to get it started? And it seems like the universe has your back logistically? The place where I go starts the social dancing around 8:30 at night which is exactly when I have the time to do something. It’s also not too far, inexpensive, and has plenty of parking most of the time. It just really worked out — as if I didn’t have to do much. Whereas other things I’ve tried to start sometimes felt like I was working uphill. Sometimes, classes would cost a ton of money or I can’t find the right equipment in my city, or the timing is off. It seemed to me the universe helped me out a little.
McGilchrist writes:
Despite the fact that there is no culture anywhere in the world that does not have music, and in which people do not join together to sing or dance, we have relegated music to the sidelines of life. We might think of music as an individualistic, even solitary experience, but that is rare in the history of the world. In more traditionally structured societies, performance of music plays both an integral, and an integrative, role not only in celebration, religious festivals, and other rituals, but also in daily work and recreation; and it is above all a shared performance, not just something we listen to passively. It has a vital way of binding people together. In our world, competion and specialisation have made music something compartmentalised, somewhere away from life’s core. (McGilchrist, 2019)
Dancing and music has made me realize how crucial it is to practice this kind of present moment feeling. West Coast Swing is a dance that is improv’ed on the spot — as in it’s not a performance or a routine that is practiced over and over and then performed on stage. It is a partner dance where you don’t know what song you will be dancing to next and you also don’t know what patterns you will be doing. Of course, you learn some highly recommended basic patterns along the way. I feel like the dance is so special because of these characteristics. Because during the dance, it calls for your whole attention and puts you squarely in the present moment. You can’t think of anything else because you have to listen to the music, listen to your lead/follow, and listen to your body.
One of the unique aspects of this type of experience is that while you are on the floor, it is very hard for the left hemisphere to intercept. More often than not, you are tugged back to the present moment. For example, when you are attempting to work on some kind of skill like your anchor step, you can only work on it for so long before your lead tugs you back to the present moment. He/She seems to say, “Hey, focus on us, we are here together, are you listening?” While it is totally fine to work on your steps and movement, the tug back into the present moment hints at where it is most important to be during the dance.
The very first thing you learn when you take a West Coast Swing class is connection with your partner. And even when you go up the ranks, teachers still talk about connection, connection, connection. We all start out by holding both of our partner’s hands, swaying back and forth, and seeing if our partner follows our movement. Gradually, we close our eyes and see if we can sense our partner’s location (left, right, up, down, etc.) with just their hands in ours (without them moving their hands much). At the start, I was skeptical of being able to guess correctly without sight. But as I did this exercise over and over, it was a success most of the time! You do get the sense of where your partner is right from holding onto their hands.
Your hands are the connection points through which you feel your partner. It is in that space where your hands meet, that’s where the dance is created, that’s where two people come together as one. McGilchrist writes in The Master and His Emissary (bear with me here, I promise there’s a point):
Our attention is responsive to the world. There are certain modes of attention which are naturally called forth by certain kinds of object. We pay a different sort of attention to a dying man from the sort of attention we’d pay to a sun, or a carburettor. However, the process is reciprocal. It is not just that what we find determines the nature of the attention we accord to it, but that the attention we pay to anything also determines what it is we find. (McGilchrist, 2019)
One way of putting this is to say that we neither discover an objective reality nor invent a subjective reality, but that there is a process of responsive evocation, the world ‘calling forth’ something in me that in turn ‘calls forth’ something in the world… as music arises from neither the piano nor the pianist’s hands, the sculpture neither from hand nor stone, but from their coming together. (McGilchrist, 2019)
I believe this is exactly what happens when two people are dancing West Coast Swing. Instead of the world ‘calling forth’, it is my partner who calls forth a certain movement; it evokes something in me to move in a certain way and then my response evokes something in my partner. It is beautiful. In talented dancers, they slow down and listen to what their partner is saying. The lead steps 1, 2 and he waits. The follow responds with 3 and 4 and that evokes something within the lead to do something with what he is given. The dance is always in flux, always moving, always changing. Rarely do we think like this in real life. We don’t believe that we are co-creators with the universe. We are consumers, yes. We are passive, yes. We are goal-oriented, yes. Co-creators?! No way. We either feel like we have no control or we bulldoze our way through to get to our goal. Lately, I’ve been trying to take a few steps in the direction that I want to go and then try to listen to what the universe is saying. Then I respond, go a few steps, then listen again. It has been incredibly freeing.
Finally, I want to talk about the process of learning this dance or any artistic endeavor for that matter. A question that came up time and time again for me was how does practicing the skills of this dance connect with the intuitive aspects of movement. I think the below passage really answers it:
What is offered by the right hemisphere is offered back again and taken up into a synthesis involving both hemispheres. This must be true of the processes of creativity, of the understanding of works of art, of the development of the religious sense. In each there is a progress from an intuitive apprehension of whatever it may be, via a more formal process of enrichment through conscious, detailed analytic understanding, to a new, enhanced intuitive understanding of this whole, now transformed by the process that it has undergone. (McGilchrist, 2019)
I think this perfectly captures how you get better at dancing! It starts with your own personal intuitive way of moving through music. Then you sharpen your movements. You tighten up your turns so they are not so wobbly. You drill and practice your basic patterns — which becomes the left hemisphere’s part. When you are practicing, the patterns are static, dead, and detached from music. Then this gets ‘lifted up’ and used in the right hemisphere. When you go dancing again, your intuitive movements are now bolstered by the left hemisphere training and enriched by your practice.
Some people get stuck, however.
This idea, though difficult, is critically important, because … there has been a tendency for the left hemisphere to see the workings of the right hemisphere as purely incompatible, antagonistic, as a threat to its dominion — the emissary perceiving the Master to be a tyrant. This is an inevitable consequence of the fact that the left hemisphere can support only a mechanistic view of the world, according to which it would certainly be true that the unifying tendency of the right hemisphere would reverse its achievements in delineating individual entities. (McGilchrist, 2019)
People get stuck practicing or learning different patterns that they forget that there was a point to the left hemisphere’s drills and practices. The things created by the left hemisphere is a means to an end. And that end is always to merge with the right hemisphere for the greater purpose of goodness, truth, and beauty. It is not practice for practice sake. It is not “I want to learn a new pattern just to learn a new pattern”. The key idea is that these things that you drill help your intuition for the dance. It is in the implicit that you will find how to elevate your dance. You will never find it by learning another pattern.
Mcgilchrist, I. (2019). The Master and His Emissary : The Divided brain and The Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.