Social Dance: Welcome Chance Intrusions!

Richard Powers, the legendary social dance teacher at Stanford, has a website where he's collected some of his thoughts, philosophies, and musings on social dance.

In the short articles titled "Social Dance to Succeed in a Competitive Marketplace" and "Welcome Chance Intrusions!" he stresses the importance of adaptability and "lateral thinking" in social dance, lessons he also believes apply more broadly to life.  In dance, you must quickly adapt to new partners and new situations (deciding your next step based literally on where you are in the moment, not on some pre-determined plan, or a rigid definition of legal/illegal moves).  

There is ambiguity/choice in what step or variation you can perform next, which is empowering and exciting, as are chance intrusions, or deviations from the norm. Dancers make meaning from and delight in not knowing what wonderful thing could be created next.

I took "DANCE 46: Social Dance 1" this past year, and I can say these principles definitely apply in my work outside of the studio. Richard Powers has been teaching social dance for over 40 years, and these topics have been a core part of his course curriculum.

I think spending part of a class having an outside guest do a mini dance lesson could be a great way to expose students to the ambiguity created in this art form.

Social dance also provides a rich context for discussion questions, like:

• How does being either the lead or follow influence the dancer's perception of ambiguity?
• How does being a social context, surrounded by many other dancing couples, influence your decisions or reactions?
• What techniques and skills prepare dance students to go from dance lessons to being confident in a real-world social dance setting?  How does that translate to how we might prepare design students for real-world projects?