What is true technique? According to Greek etymology, the word comes from art. In the modern sense, technique means the set of procedures used to achieve a result that is true to a methodological matrix. In the world of dance, technique is a word used with a bit of both senses. It means a form of order, orientation, which takes the dance out of the realm of chaos. This is also close to the meaning of "art" given by the ancient Greeks. A technical dancer is one who knows how to structure his body and its movements according to rules. The rules exist to connect the dancer to a fixed structural basis. The aim of the technique in dance is not killing the inspiration, but to establish a base. In dance as in other sciences, to acquire "techniche" means to take control over the fundamentals. The base and the fundamentals gives the dancer control and resources for his reading of the music.
Many Europeans and dance professionals from the rest of the world think that the classic ballet gathers the maximum of knowledge concerning the technical development of the body. This, of course, is based on a simple prejudice. Dance is not acrobatics. The Technic spirit of a dance must develop in parallel to the spirit of the music that is danced to, and not by simple correlation to rules for flexibility and balance. These last are just one more resource, an aid. Classic ballet should always be present in the study line of a dancer, but it should not be always the main line of his study. To lend the line of breathing and movement of ballet to dance to salsa is not just a recipe for ridicule, it is also a technical lie.
However, it is undoubted that techniques of tap dance, classic ballet, jazz, can help a dancer of any style. That true we do not contest. However, the boundless boldness of the international federation of ballroom dancing to establish their own rules to regulate and define the Latin dance - Tango, rumba, samba - can only be a recipe for the grotesque. It is the opposite of what technique means. While techniche serves to establish rules that connect the dancer to a homogeneous artistic line, faithful especially to the music and the culture, the arbitrariness of international ballroom can only: deliver a distorted version of the original dance.
A major goal of any dance study is to give technical naturalness to the movements of a dancer, unifying the dancer and the music. The rules of international Latin dances do the opposite: they give artificiality to the dancer's body structure, making it a mere stereotype, i.e, something that he doesn't really knows, but tries to imitate following alien criteria. This is super exposed in some aspects: the fake smiles, the clown faces, the exaggerated contortions and the forced movements of the hips. To see the difference, just compare the subtlety of a Cuban dancer when she moves the hips. International practitioners seems like a circus owner that visited an exotic country, and now try to present them to his impressionable audience. In a globalized world with many youtube videos available, however, it is harder to deceive people. That is why it is faded to become a recreation to old men.
I will speak in another post about the technical root of samba. Here, I will only say that the technical rules of samba are faithful to a body personality produced by the mixture of African, European and indigenous movements, which today are part of Brazil's personality: the Brazilian typical swagger, or "ginga", is a way of referring to it. The video below shows this personality in an intense and mature technical expression: ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
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