Learning can be hard. Practice builds confidence.

 I applaud the courage it takes to walk into a brand new class (of any kind), especially to start learning something completely new! It is not unlike meeting someone for the first time who speaks a different language, and you find yourself sitting next to them for an hour and a half. Hopefully this kind of situation is something that is intriguing rather than terrifying. Or maybe it is a bit of both?

Teaching in Taylor Dance West studios 2025. Photo: Amy Marshall

I think I have said this before, "The older I get, the less I like being a beginner!" At the same time, I do think that trying to learn something new is a very good practice to keep our minds and bodies agile and current with life events. It is astonishing to think that I can now say, "with each passing decade..." and it does seem that time speeds up as I get older.

The reality is probably more like me learning much slower as I age. Once upon a time I really enjoyed learning how to move in different ways, and studying how to speak different languages. I still love the IDEA of doing these things, but I am less patient with myself, and I realize that what might have taken me two weeks, will likely take me six months, and my personal sense of fluency may never live up to my imagined outcomes. However, I love having the opportunity to share some of what I have actually accomplished in life, whether that is the skills of dancing and coordination, or sharing perspectives from the myriad jobs, careers, hats I have worn.

It is easier to offer a different perspective on "outcomes" when I meet new dancers who come to take any class I am teaching. Beginners are often categorized because they do not know what they "do not know". And that is the way of the world. Adult beginners may have an easier time understanding that learning takes time, than children. However, in dance, there are similar strategies for introducing a movement language, and I am reminded of how much professional dancers need to take their hard earned skills for granted. Building good basic habits is the framework on which dancers can concentrate on the new and unfamiliar without needing to always be focused on how to articulate a part of our body, much less coordinate multiple limbs in relation to each other.

To paraphrase the author Lewis Thomas in his introduction to "Lives of a Cell", try to imagine how much of your conscious brain power might be needed to control the functions of the millions of cells that make up your body. Nature has allowed our cells and their collective abilities to hopefully develop and grow in service of letting our consciousness focus on training or muscles to move our bodies as a whole. Furthering that control relies on training our bodies with dance-habits that allow us to work on trickier combinations of movements, and so on...

Above is a short clip of an iconic section from Paul Taylor's "Dust". It lasts for under a minute, but is some of the trickiest movement to learn and dance as one for the seven dancers. This is the 1997 cast that includes myself with Caryn Heilman, Lisa Viola, Heather Berest, Silvia Nevjinsky, Takehiro Ueyama, and Ted Thomas.