Taking dance lessons has been a very interesting and rewarding experience
for me at so many different levels. Of course, there are the obvious
benefits to studying dance - it's a great form of exercise, it's an
enormous amount of fun, and it is a wonderful confidence-builder - not just
for kids, but for anyone of any age. It's a wonderful creative and
expressive outlet as well.

I was also surprised to find how much studying dance provided me with very
rich opportunities for personal growth. It has helped so much in giving me
a greater sense of poise and confidence in expressing myself through
movement, and it has helped me to overcome a fear of making mistakes, of
"being wrong," (Trust me - I make all kinds of mistakes! I'm just not
*afraid* of them anymore, because I learn and I grow *through* them. :-))
It has also helped me (strangely enough) to identify personal insecurities
and to work on them through dance. (Like a sort of a self-styled movement
therapy, I guess!)

From a technical perspective, as someone who has studied dance for a few
years, I've found that studying with a good instructor has dramatically
shortened my learning curve. Instead of having to figure things out on my
own, having an instructor gives me someone I can ask questions to, someone
to provide me with feedback and insights on how to improve my work, someone
to help me troubleshoot when I'm having problems learning a figure, and
someone who can demystify the "how" of executing a dance step properly.
(As I've found, a lot of the technical aspects of dance are not easily
perceived by the average onlooker, and without a dance instructor to help
me learn, for example, how to create "load" in order to unleash a step with
speed and precision, I would be entirely clueless.) One of the particular
benefits that I've found in working one-on-one with an instructor is that
he is able not only to tell me what to do and how to do it, but he is able
to identify the "inclusions" - those movements or actions that I'm doing
that *shouldn't* be in the figure or the action that I'm working on - and
help me to eliminate them. In short, he helps me purify and refine my
dancing.

Studying with an instructor has also shed a lot of light for me on the
performing/competition aspect of dance. I have a musical performance
background, and so I thought it was all the same. Surprisingly, dance
performance/competition is quite a bit different from performing or
competing in music. With music, you work and work and polish until you
have a finished, completed, "perfect" product. Then you perform it. It
took me a while to get used to the fact that the quality of your dancing is
something that you're *always* polishing, always improving, and that every
performance, every competition simply shows where you are at that *moment*.
Because of the ongoing nature of growing and evolving as a dancer, it is
possible to have an *excellent* product on the floor, but you'll probably
never have a *perfect* product in a performance or competition. (That was
a hard one for me to get used to!) I do love the polishing aspect of
dancing, however. It is so rewarding to see even the tiniest improvements
on steps or movements that I have been working diligently to improve. I
enjoy the sense of crafting something, of shaping something, under the
guidance of a master dancer/teacher.

One of the most valuable things that I have come to realize is that when
you study with a good instructor (and by this I mean someone who has
studied and competed extensively him/herself) you are not just learning
from that one person. Rather you are tapping into the combined years of
knowledge and experience of that person and all the people that *they* have
studied with and learned from. The knowledge that you gain in this fashion
is very refined and is very highly evolved, making it possible for you to
learn far more quickly that you would be able to on your own. It is a
very, very rich experience to learn in this way, and to be able to be a
small part of a greater lineage of dancers who have handed their knowledge
down from dancer to dancer over the years.

Dorothy Bassett