** waking Kiwi up 6am on Sunday is hell! Just a few more Sundays then we can have a break at Xmas **
Placement test in a week so a lot of work these days. Sure to pass the first part as technique will not be a problem for me. My concern is the second part which includes the analysis of the history and music of five dances- distinguishing the dances is easy but history?
And now I am busy cramping the history into my tiny brain. As I do so, I recall the 'Form and Expression' principle. I first learnt of its importance was from the lecturer of a language teaching course. That was a long time ago but F&E itself is such a useful concept for both of the things I have been teaching that I can hardly not to recite it often. And the more I think about the F&E, the more I find it is actually a universal truth for all artsy works, include but not only writing and dancing.
'Form' is the correctness of the presentation; 'expression' is the content of the presentation. When it comes to writing, form is grammar while expression is the objective of the writing; in dancing, form is technique whereas expression is the emotion of the dance.
Well, form and expression are equally important. If you want to have things done exactly the way they need to be, it is a matter of hard practice, I am often asked how to write grammatically, as well as how to dance precisely. Well, there is no secret, but a lot of practice. If you want to manage the perfect technique, or whenever you have questions about details, you can always find reference from textbooks. Therefore, it is more like a linear relation between time and skills.
Skills is undoubtedly essential, however, if achieving accuracy becomes your only goal, whatever art you are working on, your art is lifeless, for accuracy does not guarantee expressiveness. How meaningless it will be to have your dedicated devotion a crap without life.
Recalling Ai-weiwei's saying, I believe that expressing yourself is a strong enough reason, for anything. An expressive work with proper skills can charm, and the problem is here: to bear an objective and to have the right emotion about it.
More than often we find children' s writings are empty- no content at all, no imagination, no feeling revealed, not creative, just barely words been written down, one can hardly rely on the writing to gauge the writer's mind. Maybe you find it unimportant, as long as it's grammatically correct and and help retain marks. What I am exactly saying, though, is that, the empty articles, to a certain extent, tells us that our generation are not ambitious enough, and are unwilling to think.
The same is also common in dancing. There are a lot of people dancing but only few can master good technique; among them, only a handful can present their dance well. Why? To move people's heart with your dance, you need to understand what different dances represent- choose the right dance with the right music, present it with the right mood as if the dance represents your heart. To be able to do this, an understanding of the history, as well as how different dances develop to their distinctive personality, is just necessary.
If I want to be a competent dancer, yes, working hard is just necessary.