“Yeah, but you were born dancing…”

My dance students say this when they start to lose faith in their ability to learn to dance. I’m telling them that they can do something… they are telling me that they can’t. I tell them if I can do it, they can too. “Yeah, but….” soon follows.

Well, here we have it. WE WERE ALL DANCING BABIES!!!

It is thought that starting around 25 weeks of development, babies start to hear and recognize sounds in the womb. Even though the sound is muffled, babies can hear voices and music. In time, babies can start responding and moving in time to music and voices.

My own baby is far more active when the room is filled with R&B and Soul music. I swear I’m starting to feel kicked in time to the music. Bobby Brown, En Vogue and Ne-Yo have been rocking the baby today. This baby may come out swing dancing too… well, at least recognizing the music.

Below is an article from LiveScience. It discusses how dancing and a sense of rhythm may be something we are born with.

Babies Are Born to Dance

“Babies love a beat, according to a new study that found dancing comes naturally to infants.

The research showed babies respond to the rhythm and tempo of music, and find it more engaging than speech.

The findings, based on a study of 120 infants between 5 months and 2 years old, suggest that humans may be born with a predisposition to move rhythmically in response to music.

“Our research suggests that it is the beat rather than other features of the music, such as the melody, that produces the response in infants,” said researcher Marcel Zentner, a psychologist at the University of York in England. “We also found that the better the children were able to synchronize their movements with the music, the more they smiled.”

To test babies’ dancing disposition, the researchers played recordings of classical music, rhythmic beats and speech to infants, and videotaped the results. They also recruited professional ballet dancers to analyze how well the babies matched their movements to the music.

During the experiments, the babies were sitting on a parent’s lap, though the adults had headphones to make sure they couldn’t hear the music and were instructed not to move.

The researchers found the babies moved their arms, hands, legs, feet, torsos and heads in response to the music, much more than to speech.

Though the ability appears to be innate in humans, the researchers aren’t sure why it evolved.

“It remains to be understood why humans have developed this particular predisposition,” Zentner said. “One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music or that it has evolved for some other function that just happens to be relevant for music processing.”

Zentner and his colleague Tuomas Eerola, from the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyvaskyla, in Finland, detailed their findings in the March 15 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

Excerpt from Yahoo! News

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100315/sc_livescience/babiesareborntodance

Kids, Teens and Adults must be born to dance too!

This was my favorite part of the article, “humans may be born with a predisposition to move rhythmically in response to music.” That’s right, we can’t fight it. We are all dancers by birth. So why do we struggle to learn to dance?

I’m not a scientist, but here is my theory. Babies aren’t taught to dance, they just feel the rhythm of the music and move. In time, babies learn to stomp, clap, kick, wave their hands and move their heads. As they learn to move and control their bodies better, they start to incorporate these movements into their dance. Once again, nobody is teaching them, they just feel the rhythm and move. The key to this is that they FEEL THE RHYTHM OF THE MUSIC AND MOVE.

As we grow and develop, we give up our faith in what we feel and follow our heads instead. Our faith is in what we think. Though the brain enjoys music, it processes it differently than our bodies did in childhood. Our brain is analytical and starts judging. The brain examines our movements, and compares it to the music, others dancing and everyone else in the room watching. WE STOP FEELING THE RHYTHM AND THINK ABOUT IT INSTEAD. OUR BODIES STOP MOVING AND OUR BRAIN STARTS JUDGING.

How do we get back to feeling the music?

ZeDiamond Dance Method is based on feeling the rhythm of music before taking your first dance step. With ZeDiamond Dance Method Learn the East Coast Swing 2 DVD set, you will be taken back to feeling the rhythm of the music. Without your brain getting in the way, you will feel the music and move to the rhythm inside of you. Exercises based in DiRRiD, will help you regain your natural sense of rhythm. Just like a child, you will step, clap and use your voice to discover the rhythm that is innately inside of you.

Once you’ve got your groove back, then the dance steps will just flow out of you. ZeDiamond Dance Method teaches you to move to your natural rhythm and suddenly, you are swing dancing! You learn easy East Coast Swing Dance moves and let them flow out of you, naturally.

Click here and watch a short video clip that lets you see how ZeDiamond Dance Method works.

See you out on the dance floor,

Amy Barnes

ZeDiamond Dance Method