It is important to learn to have a neutral mental image of our body, of its real possibilities and not subject to forms made by other dancers or teachers, because these are images with value judgments: beautiful, ugly, I like it, I don’t like it, flamenco or not flamenco, with a subjective judgment that we adhere to while trying to imitate.
Imitation is the basis of learning for children, which adults continue to reproduce as part of that child pattern. But the mature or conscious adult has broader and richer resources, such as being present and giving free rein to their self-expression, without a subjective image of the dancer they like or the teacher they prefer, or the idea they have of what flamenco dancing is. Following this path, the only thing left for this adult with childish resources is to closely resemble what they imitate, which would make them successful; or to never achieve it, leading to guaranteed frustration. If you notice, this is what a small child wants, to look like mom or dad.
In the TCC (Conscious Body Technique) work, we use the Flamenco Vitruvian Man. Yes, Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man offers us a neutral image for the body, with perfect dimensions and wisdom to discover its unlimited potential and thus return the body to a natural and pure state. For example, learning to make a marking from neutrality where it only matters to create a correct movement in terms of body dynamics, using our body in coherence with this neutrality is when the art that emerges from the depth of one’s unique and personal expression.
In the Flamenco Vitruvian Man class, you will learn to apply neutral visual images to your body that will be stored in your memory and body register, creating a range of new sensations to refer to whenever you need to make a certain movement. You will learn how to create movement templates, based on the conscious body technique, in which you will then recreate yourself, as if they were the skeleton of our expression.
By starting to work educating the body in this way, we obtain a clean internal space where our own creativity can emerge, generating an expansive emotion that gives us the peace of feeling within a creative body.
When we try to mentally reproduce and force our body to do what someone else does, it also generates an emotion but of frustration and helplessness because we imitate the movement of another – this goes beyond whether we do it successfully or not – because deep down we know that we are no longer those children and as adults, we feel that our dance does not express everything we feel.
La India
