'Rhythm' came up in this thread, and intuition (or whatever you call internalising information) comes up in lots of threads, and I have a particular hobby-horse in talking about the benefits of studying suji over shape, or the dynamic over static.
It was therefore of great interest to read something last night on this topic but with a different sidelight. There was also a piece of information new to me which I have bolded here, but which was not emphasised in the original. I will give a longish quote so as to provide sufficient context. The overall context is a book called
The Everyday Dancer by Deborah Bull, who was a ballet equivalent of a 9-dan go pro, being a Principal with the Royal Ballet (she is now Baroness BUll CBE). I recommend the book strongly. I will assume the readers here can make the relevant connections with amateur go and previous threads.
To an outsider, the first rehearsals of a ballet would probably appear to be rather slow and inconsequential. fractured movement phrases interrupted by some head scratching and sections repeated over and over again as we struggle to claw back the physical sensation of choreography that has not been danced - or even thought about - for months, if not years. It's hard - even for the dancers involved - to see the connection between these early studio calls and the polished performance of the first night.
Some dancers are better than others at recalling once-familiar steps from dusty memory stores. Frequently we remember, but not quite accurately, swearing we did a step on the left leg when the evidence (a video, for instance) proves it was on the right. When ballets are long out of the repertoire, dancers are likely to remember the rhythm and dynamics of the choreography rather than the exact steps, certain that it went 'di dum, dum, dum, and three and four', but unsure exactly what it was. Interrogating the memory too consciously can cause it to retreat for ever into some distant corner of the brain, and too many questions usually prove fatal. ('No, no, don't ask, just let me do it for you.') Even now, as I try to recall snippets of choreography from my dancing years, I know that I'm best placed to do it as I'm falling asleep at night, when my conscious brain is a bit less 'on duty' than it is during the day.
WE talk a lot about getting things 'into our bodies' and it's true that when we really know a ballet, it seems to be stored directly in our muscles and not in our brains. But while 'muscle memory' is a good way of describing how it feels to dance a well-rehearsed role, it's not accurate. The body doesn't function like a memory-foam mattress, storing shapes and movements as indentations within its lean tissue. What 'muscle memory' probably means is that the steps have been repeated so often, and over such a long period of time, that the skill has become unconscious, their 'memory' moved from the centre of the brain to the cerebellum. When you dance these highly familiar steps, it feels as if your body is doing them on its own, without any reference to the conscious brain, as if you're dancing on autopilot. This is a vital stage in progressing from fumbling first rehearsal to expert performance, and it leaves the frontal cortex free for the important business of interpretation and interaction with the other artists on the stage.
