| Nov. 21st, 2009 @ 04:41 pm Intermediacy |
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Current Mood:  introspective
I've decided I hate the word "intermediate." What does it mean? Not a beginner anymore, not yet an expert? But we all know that's a continuum, a vast gray in-between land of almost-but-not-quite.
The classes at Atlanta Varsity Showdown this year were divided into two levels: beginner and intermediate/advanced. Obviously if you've taken a bunch of lindy classes and go dancing every week, you're not going to opt for the beginner classes--which meant that the other level was smeared unevenly across that gray in-between land. Of the leads I danced with, only about a dozen of them really qualified as "advanced" dancers; the rest ranged somewhere between fresh-out-of-lindy-101 and what we might call "high-intermediate." It was a disappointment to me, bc I think I'm approaching that latter state, and was looking forward to pushing myself by trying the advanced classes this year, only to discover that there *were* no advanced classes.
The thing is, I've been an "intermediate" dancer for the last, oh, three years? In that time, I've become a much *better* dancer, fixing numerous frame and technique problems, adding to my repertoire of moves and variations and learning how to respond on the fly to changes in the music. But I'm still an "intermediate" dancer.
I've been thinking that it would be better to use some kind of larger scale that would subdivide the gray in-between. (Some major dance events do this--I think Beantown Camp and Lindy Focus have as many as five levels.) The way I've been thinking about it is that level 1 would be your raw beginners, your lindy 101 graduates who go to Hot Jam every week or so, but are still kind of stiff and uncertain. Level 2 would be "I've been dancing for about six months, and it's starting to feel like dancing and not just doing moves." Then you'd get to level 3, a sort of solid intermediate, "I've been dancing for more than a year, dance at least once or twice a week, take classes, and I'm ready to start really exploring things like musicality and variations." Level 4 would be something like "I've got a good, solid frame, a good standard repertoire, I can improvise and respond to the music, and I'm ready to do things like perform and compete." Level 5: "I'm a high-level dancer in demand as a partner, I know how to really communicate on the dance floor, and I can usually place in competitions, or at least make the finals." Then there would be level 6 for the really top-level dancers, the instructors and master-level folks. And I suppose we could add a level 7, for the late, great Frankie Manning and the other old-time gods of the lindy hop pantheon. :)
The way I see it, you generally social dance with people either at your own level, or one above or below. If you want to really work on improving your dancing, you need to be asking people 1-2 levels ahead of you to dance. I think I'm starting to feel like a level 4 dancer, according to my little taxonomy, thus I usually dance with 3s or other 4s, and try to work up the courage to ask the 5s and 6s to dance. I'm trying to push myself into level 5, so that some of them will ask *me* to dance!
Of course this isn't some kind of hard-and-fast rule--advanced dancers dance with beginners all the time, and that's both fun and important to the continuation of the dance scene. It's more just what I've observed on the dance floor, social patterns that emerge over time. (My Intercultural Communication class last year got me really interested in ethnographic observation.)
And speaking of my classes, this problem of "intermediate" shows up there too. What is an "intermediate" language speaker? As with dancing, I've been an intermediate German speaker since about the middle of my undergraduate studies. But the difference between me as a college junior and me as an adult, taking conversation classes in Munich, is huge. And let's not forget the regression I've suffered from not speaking enough German in the last several years. Am I still intermediate?
Man, I *really* hate that word. |
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