Dancing

I dance. It's a partner dance, and it is a source of great joy. I can heartily recommend learning to dance, especially a partner dance.

Someone once described dancing as 'illustrating the music'. This I find to be a beautiful and accurate description. Listening to the music, trying to anticipate what's coming, and then doing something that you think fits to that, is a lot of fun.

There is also the joy of finding a 'connection' with your partner. Sometimes, when you dance, something 'clicks' and you and your partner are able to read each other, complementing each other's moves. This is close to being a transcendental experience. It's as if you're drawing something on paper with another person, and you both know what you're going to draw, so the lead draws the main structure, and the follow embellishes the structure, turning it into something beautiful.

This experience does, though, require some skill, both for the follow and the lead. I think there are two types of skill required: Motoric skill (being able to control your body) and creative skill. I will embellish on the latter below.

When you first start dancing, you learn 'turns', which are moves or short 'dance modules', if you like, that you can string together while dancing. Learning turns is vital, especially if you're a lead. However, one can easily get into the mindset that 'in order to become a good dancer, I have to learn a lot of turns'. This is incorrect - or rather, it is correct, but not for the reason you think.

Some of their rules can be bent. Others... can be broken.

Learning turns is an important means to another end, it's not an end in itself. The true end in dancing is to be able to illustrate the music in exactly the way you want yourself. Turns can help you on the way to that goal, but eventually, if you insist on only doing 'turns' that you have learned before, they will constrain your dancing. At some point, you will find yourself in the situation where you know that you want to illustrate the music in a specific way, but you find that you don't know the turn to do that. And that is the point at which you must start to break free from the turns. You must take what you know, based on doing turns, and turning that into creative music-illustration.

 The above is probably true of all creative endeavors - you learn the ropes, but in order to be truly creative you have to understand that the ropes are structures that eventually will constrain you.