Remembering The Figures

Yesterday I fired up my tiny digital camera and showed a non-dancing colleague a short video from my dance lesson, and she was astonished, asking: “how do you remember all that complex stuff?” I laughed, of course, because mostly I don’t remember, much of the time feel like a complete klutz, and I certainly try the patience of my teachers. But her question stayed with me, and the more I thought about it the more wonderful and wonderfully complex the question of remembering became. I’ve come up with a list of the different ways I remember, there’s …
Muscle memory. When you learn a new figure, movement, or way of holding yourself and practice it a lot, your muscles and nervous system grow to support it: all these efforts, this will to do a thing a certain way, actually builds and trains muscles and nerves and brain. For example, it now seems natural for me to …