*What is Bridging:
Actively listening to and assessing your partners’ dance styles, abilities, and emotional states and adjusting your own within your ability and comfort to meet your partner where they are. Bridging occurs on a spectrum, where a dancer will have varying capacity to build towards someone else. Bridging can occur with one person fully reaching out to another, or two people building towards each other to create a mutually shared space where they dance best together.
*The purpose of Bridging:
Creating commonality with someone is a basis for communication. If I am a Kizomba dancer and I’m dancing Kiz at a waltzer the dance might not go smoothly. The more each dancerassesses where the other dancer is coming from, and accentuates the technique in that direction the more communication will get through.
*Why Bridging Matters:
Dancing in a compatible way for another party to understand is important. It allows you to have great dances with anyone. It also allows you to gradually stretch dancers’ technique into your world as they stretch into yours. Thus you both learn from each other and create a more mutualistic dance together.
Concepts for further exploration within Bridging include:
- Lag
- Validation
- Active Dimensional Awareness
- Impetus
- Matching & Mimicking
- Calibrating to partner’s Proprioceptive Awareness. What can they feel or not through the connection point.
- The Grand Bridging Analogy