Dancing in a foreign language. Hmmm …. I’d never thought about that… But wait a minute, you don’t need language to dance. It should be the same in any language.
That’s true. As far as the actual dancing goes, it is the same in any language. When I bring groups of Japanese dancers to dance events in the U.S., one of the things that’s most exciting to them is the fact that they can freely interact on the dance floor despite any language barriers. They can even take workshops and get most or what’s being taught because dancing is so visual. As long as you’re a fairly experienced dancer, language is not really a problem.
However, when you’re first learning to dance, it’s another story. Sure, a kick ball change is a kick ball change no matter what you call it. However, for most people, you need some kind of verbal explanation in order to first learn how to do one. That’s where language becomes part of dancing. Instructors must use verbal explanations as well as visual explanations when teaching. This becomes especially important when the room is crowded and not everyone can see well.
In order to learn C/W dancing, not understanding English is definitely a handicap. When we teach C/W dancing here in Japan, we explain how to do the movement in Japanese but keep the name of the movement the same. Rather than try to translate kick ball change into Japanese, it’s still called a kick ball change. (Actually, it becomes something more like keeku bobru chainjee because we don’t have all the same phonetic sounds.) There are of course words for kick and ball and change in Japanese, but it would be very unwieldy to use them as dance terms. Not that a non-dancing English speaker would know what a kick ball change was just by hearing the words either, but at least it would give them an idea. Also, it would be easier for them to remember the name once they learned the movement.
Japanese has the added disadvantage of not even using the same alphabet. English is mandatrny in the schools here. It’s part of the required courses for all six years of junior high and high school. However, most people never become comfortable in it. They can read it to a certain degree if they have to, but shy away from it when they can. At our club we pass out all of our step descriptions in English, the originals when possible. Not only would translating them into Japanese be both difficult and time-consuming, but a lot would be lost in the translation as well. Most people who got used to reading the step descriptions find it’s easier in English. Of course learning to easily read a step description is an acquired art no matter what language you speak. The more you do it, the easier it gets. But for Japanese dancers, a lot of people don’t even try because they’re intimidated by the English.
And so we have the problem of how to disseminate information. With our own club members it’s not such a problem. However, C/W dancing is just beginning to catch on in various places all over Japan and we have lots of requests for information. For people just getting started, information in Japanese is much more accessible than information in English. There are a lot of excellent videos and informative magazines already available in English, but most beginning dancers never get past the fact that they’re in English. If it was just one or two people teaching themselves to dance at home, they could probably pick it up from a video. But then to have to go out and teach someone else that information would be next to impossible without the use of a common dance language. Imagine if you were sent a video tape of a Russian folk dance from a friend in Leningrad. If the dance was being instructed on the video, you could probably pick it up even if you couldn’t understand what they’re saying. With practice, you could probably even get pretty good at the dance. But then imagine trying to teach it to other people when you didn’t know the names for any of the steps. (“Well, your arms kind of go like this. It’s like a clap, but not really, and at the same time your right foot is bent back while your left leg is going around.“). It would be possible, but you couldn’t do it very efficiently. So as you can see, language actually is an important part of dancing. And English is definitely the language of C/Y/ dancing.
When you are first learning to C/W dance in Japan, not understanding the English terminology can be a big stumbling block for many people.
At our social dance club “Crazy Foot,” we have come up with a number of projects to lessen the language barrier. One of the projects that we recently completed was writing a line dance terminology dictionary in Japanese. Because we pass out all of our step descriptions in the original English, many people don’t even try and read them. The more detailed the step description, the harder it is for most Japanese to understand it. They can read the abbreviated line at the top of each section, but of course beginners especially often forget which step is which. In our dictionary, we have listed the major line dance terminology in alphabetical order. After the name of the term in English, we give the pronunciation of the term in Japanese (or at least as close as you can get). Then we describe the footwork etc. for the step in Japanese. This gives people something to refer to when they can’t remember what a certain step is, but can’t understand the fine points of the original step description either. We did quite a bit of research before writing the dictionary and tried to choose what seems to be generally accepted terminology in the U.S. whenever possible. As far as I know this is the first such dictionary in Japanese, and hopefully by getting it out there now we can try and unify the terminology used for teaching C/W dancing here in Japan.
We are currently at work on a teacher’s manual in Japanese as well. We need many more instructors and have made that one of our priorities for this year. We hope that by offering some concrete teaching tips in Japanese, we can help new instructors skip some of that trial and error period that we had to go through when we taught ourselves how to teach others.
Another important project was making an instructional line dance video in Japanese. It is much easier, especially for beginning dancers, to learn from an instructor who is speaking their own language. Last year we videotaped a one-day beginners workshop we’d done and edited it into a video. We had thought we could probably sell 20 or so, but ended up making over 80 copies. Due to the success of last year’s video, we have decided to make it a yearly project and will be making another one this spring.
An added advantage to this project is that it means that people all over Japan are learning the same dances. We certainly don’t want to limit what dances people are doing, but it is nice to have a certain number of core dances in common so that when people get together from different areas they can actually dance together. Again, we try to choose dances that seem to be fairly popular in the U.S. so that if people should ever get a chance to go and dance somewhere in the U.S., they should know at least some of the dances being done there as well.
Last but not least, we host a yearly dance festival/workshop with top instructors from the U.S. We want to expose people to the best level of dancing and teaching possible. Last year we brought over SCOTT and DEBORAH BLEVINS from Highland, IN. This year we bringing over JO THOMPSON and her partner TIM SZYMANSKI. There are 3 days of line and couples workshops and all of them are translated into Japanese for the people attending. This way they get used to hearing instruction in English, but don’t have to miss out on anything because they didn’t understand. Usually, the dance steps are pretty straight forward and don’t require much translation. However, the styling aspects are more subtle and it helps to have them explained again in Japanese. We videotape all of the workshops so that people can go back and catch anything they missed the first time. We have had a very positive response to this and have noticed that just since our festival last fall, the level of dancing here seems to have gone up a notch.
So as you can see, we’ve had to do a little work to make C/W dancing more accessible to the average Japanese dancer. We don’t want people to think that it’s too difficult just because it’s done in English. And so far we seem to be doing pretty well, as the popularity of C/W dancing here in Japan is definitely on the rise.
