What does it mean to truly lead and follow? A lead has the ability to make his partner shine, while maintaining solid ground and providing a source of strength for her to float through the steps. There is a trust between them that is inexplicable and can only be felt while dancing. It is a form of communication that does not include words. It only includes sentimientos/feelings of the heart. This connection is what keeps them going around the dance floor, focused on each other without a care in the world or a worry about what is going on around them. Anything going on around them doesn’t matter. All that matters is the connection they have with each other. This is so important. Keeping frame, connection and concentration is what maintains their ability to dance in tune with each other and ultimately in tune with the música/music. This is what makes the dance so beautiful. From the outside, the connection is seen and almost felt by bystanders. The sparkle of hope that is felt gives others inspiration and hope. Hope that there actually is something more. Inspiration to go out and make it happen in their own lives. They are portraying on the outside what they are feeling on the inside. Dance is an expression of emotion. The dance floor is the stage to express the emotions felt throughout your life.

In the book Cherish by Gary Thomas, he puts it so well in an analogy of a ballerina:

     “Famed Russian-born ballet choreographer George Balanchine once said, “Ballet is woman.” The best male dancers recognize that their role is all about showcasing the female dancer’s beauty, particularly during the pas de deux-couples’ dancing. People generally go to the ballet to see the beautiful form, grace, balance coordination, and strength of the female lead, but all of those qualities are even better showcased when the ballerina has a male dancer who can set her up, catch her, and support her.

      As a former male dancer and later choreographer, Balanchine said his job was to “make the beautiful more beautiful.”

     With a strong and gifted male dancer nearby, the ballerina can do more and attempt more than she could in a solo endeavor. In the words of Sarah Jessica Parker (who put together a documentary on the New York City Ballet), “When a male dancer is paired with a ballerina, he can support, stabilize, lift, and turn her, allowing the partner to perform feats she could never do alone.”  

From age two to age 18, based on my training in ballet, this made complete sense to me. The ballerina was the star of the show and the male dancer was there to support her and hold her up and make her shine. It wasn’t until college when I studied ballroom dancing, that I began to see dancing from a different perspective. One as equals. One as partners, meaning two people engaged in the same activity. After reading Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, I learned an entirely different way of being regarding dancing and then I was able to see it with new eyes.

You see, in ballet the ballerina really is the lead, but in partner dancing there is generally a male lead and a female follow. Lead is defined as the one taking the initiative in an action. The follow comes after in time. This really changes everything. All I had learned had been flipped entirely upside down. I had to relearn everything. Once again, a student of my own life.

 This passage really hit home for me from her book Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

     “To begin with, it is a pattern of freedom. Its setting has not been cramped in space or time. An island, curiously enough, gives a limitless feeling of both. Nor has the day been limited in kinds of activity. It has a natural balance of physical, intellectual and social life. It has an easy unforced rhythm. Work is not deformed by pressure. Relationship is not strangled by claims. Intimacy is tempered by lightness of touch. We have moved through our day like dancers, not needing to touch more than lightly because we were instinctively moving to the same rhythm.

     A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart’s. To touch heavily would arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, face to face, back to back-it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, being invisibly nourished by it.

     The joy of such a pattern is not only the joy of creation or of participation, it is also the joy of living in the moment. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined. One cannot dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on the step as it comes. Perfect poise on the beat is what gives good dancing its sense of ease, of timelessness, of the eternal.”

So, this is what I am working on. I will keep you posted. To be continued…