Toronto ON, Canada:
I attended a session on Latin-American music and its rhythms at the MTNA/CFTMA Collaborative Conference last week. Although the session wasn't extremely interesting to me, I learned something about myself.
This was a Dalcroze-eurhythmics class in a nutshell and the participants had to move to music. Musicians are often stereotyped to be the non-conformists in society BUT when 40 musicians are in the same room together, they will again conform within themselves. When our presenter asked us to walk to the music, almost by instinct we walked in a circle (counter-clockwise). It made sense cos we utilized the largest amount of space.
Then she said, "I didn't mean to walk in circles, I just want you to walk." At that point, a few of us (yours truly included) turned and walked clockwise, against the grain. Gradually, this small group became more and more adventurous, walking diagonally across the room, zigzagging, and walking in between & against all the others who were still in the circle. I could not help by whispering to another music teacher, "You can tell who the non-conformists are in this room, can't you?" We both laughed!
I am a non-conformist (hahahahaha) and the thing that struck me was that I was not afraid of breaking up the circle. In fact, I was encouraging other people to break out of the "rut". I remember people have to dodge us and avoid colliding with us. As the exercise progressed, there were more and more people that were willing to move randomly. I did not stay to the end of the presentation but in this short 15 minutes, I discovered another part of myself.
