Dance: Two ideals in dancing; Marionette and water

Bluntly put, there are dancers who look good. And there are dancers who don't.

Usage of your body plays a major part of it.

Here is a hint for improving your body usage; mind "Marionette and water". They represent two ideals for dancers.

"Marionette"

Think of a marionette. The doll, often with wire-frame body, hanging midair by strings connected to joints.

It looks extremely relaxed (of course). Hanging in the air, it apparently defies gravity. It will also respond to a pull of a string fast. It has a structure (body frame), which can be used for partner dances.

Ballet dancers may have heard of this ideal. Michael Jackson's moves were very close to those of a marionette. 

When we watch someone dance, we recognize the lines the body creates. We can make judgement on the body's shapes and motions instantaneously by tracing select points on the body (guess that is how human brains work, much like we recognize emoji-face with only two dots and a line). 

Motion capture technology uses the same principle by placing sensors on major joints and other places on the moving body. By tracing the movements of the sensor dots, the technology recreates human movements.

Competitive ballroom dancers tend to be long-limbed, their heads held up-high, showing the lines long and clean. They attempt to appeal to your innate motion capture technology. When your lines are bent, short, or otherwise off, it will be recognized as an unfavorable trait.


So, if you want to improve the look of your dance as a dancer, be conscious about how your joints and lines are aligned and moving, using mirror, picture, and/or video. It helps.


"Water"

"Move like water." This has been preached among martial artists, including Bruce Lee. "Watery-smooth" is an actual word to praise great dancers.

Water represents fluidity and smoothness in dancing. Fluid and smooth dancers look good.

Human body is 60-70% water. Each body part carries its own weight, and moving it can be sensed as a sensation.

To achieve fluidity and smoothness, yes, flexibility of your body is important. 

Also, mindfulness, an appearance that your body's movement and your intent are matching exactly, is critical. Placing a part of your body in exactly where you want it to be, is an indispensable part of training as a dancer. And it can be achieved by being mindful about your body sensation and connecting it with exact placement.

Dancers need to work on placement of your body parts in order to create "water-like" movements. If you are a musician, say, a pianist, a misplaced finger immediately gives you a feedback with wrong sound. Dancing does not work that way, unless you work with a mirror. 


This essay entry is a draft. I want to elaborate this "Marionette and water" concept more elsewhere, so that more dancers can use it. Learning patterns is one thing. Moving well is another.



Weather people are forecasting a stormy weather, possibly with tornadoes, tomorrow. Let's see how it goes.

Science: When results from new technology are inconsistent with those from old technology

I was reading a new paper about Alzheimer's. The paper is using a new technology called single cell sequencing, and was published in a prestigious journal Nature recently.

With the new technology, basically, researchers collect healthy and diseased brains, break the brains down to single cell-level, use new equipment to sort each nucleus, and quantify expressed gene copy number or copy number of particular genomic DNA sequence of interest in each of the nucleus.

Brain is not made of only neurons, but made of several different types of cells (excitory neuron, inhibitory neuron, astrocyte, microglia, endothelial cells, infiltrating macrophage, etc). Using known marker gene expression patterns as guidance, researchers can deduce type of the particular cell they are looking at.

The dataset is also publicized and stored in accessible archive in the journal. So we can look at the date in further detail.

That is all good. 


One thing puzzling me is that the technology did not detect much brain aneuploidy (abnormalities in the genome) in another paper. 

There is an old technology (called FISH) that looks at brain tissue on slides under microscope, then quantify brain aneuploidy by counting fluorescent signals. The old technology indicated high degree of aneuploidy in the brains.

Now, there is a discrepancy in results from the new and old technologies. In the case, which should we believe, or how do we reconcile?


There is no generalized rule. We need to decide on case-by-case basis.

At this moment, my judgement is inclined to side on results from old technology, with following reasons.

(a) Personally, I'd interpret that the new technology may be prone to cell isolation bias (meaning that aneuploid cells may not be isolated with current enzymatic process-method as well as other intact cells, thus representation error is occurring). 

I have not checked the new dataset in full, so it is my speculation. 

(b) Numbers of publication. There have been many papers with the old technology, while there are few papers with new technology yet. 

(c) Simplicity of old technology. The old technology is much simpler; look and count. New technology is also sort of look-and-count by machine, but some black box process in it.


Jury is still out. In this case, both may be correct within the boundaries of the technologies.

Science makes progress like this. We need to keep an open mind. 


The assay with new technology would cost us about $10-15K for a pilot analysis. I am working to get fund for the assay, so that I can see and compare the results myself.




PS
I am not a fan of the old technology. Aged brains (both healthy and diseased) accumulate auto-fluorescent materials, which gives big pain in using the fluorescence-based old technology. If we can use new technology to accurately observe brain aneuploidy, I'll switch to the new technology in a snap. 

Dance: Maxi and Paloma milonga (4/27/2019), "Missionary" activities in Tango

On 4/27/2019 Saturday, there was a milonga with Maxi and Paloma, professional Argentine Tango performers/instructors visiting from Miami.

[Maxi and Paloma]

Oklahoma City has a small AT community. They reached out to TangolifeOKC (David and Martha Wells), thus made this event possible.



Tango teachers occasionally act like missionaries. Bringing "good Tango" to faraway places (given that the trip financially makes sense or at least agreeable). Whether the dance roots and thrives in the city depends on many factors, but they do try. And good demos and strong dances certainly help. I was glad to have them here.


Their demos (three dances; two of which were improvised, they said) were quite impressive. I was entertained.

I had a tanda with Paloma. What impressed me was intensity of her gaze.


At the same milonga, three couples from Oklahoma State University (OSU) AT club showed their group AT performance. OSU locates in Stillwater, a college town 70 minutes drive away from OKC. I knew Irene (Art history professor in OSU) has been supervising AT club there, and David and Martha in OKC were helping choreography for their Stage tango performance. But I had not seen the performance yet. It was good to watch them dance.




Due to some other obligations, I did not attend their workshops. But I heard good words about them. 

In fact, this past Friday I went to another milonga, and chatted with a follower whose posture and overall dance looked noticeably better. She told me that she is working on the things she got from private lesson from Maxi and Paloma.

Sometimes, dance improvement is made in that simple manner. Good advice can change appearance of dance quickly. Don't assume it takes years to fix something. 

(Besides, for private lessons you are paying $100-120/hr. You better listen to the advice and reap rewards.)