Practical considerations (with a dash of ergonomics at the bottom)

I've neglected to look at the practical considerations of dancing thus far. Oops.

When we were introduced to this course, we were given the challenge of choosing an occupation that we could do for at least two hours a week, for the next nine weeks. I had lots of bright ideas, but in the end (obviously) chose dancing. Why? Eeeeveryone seemed to be doing cooking, which is something I definitely spend a couple of hours on a week due to the demands of living in a flat. But I decided to swim against the current and not do cooking. When I started looking at other possibilities, I realised that although I have super busy weeks and have something on most nights, none of these 'occupations' really cut the mustard for being done mindfully and for the necessary length of time and regularity. The other occupation I nearly chose was leading at a local youth club. This would definitely tick all the boxes, would be extremely rewarding to write about, and seems to lend itself really well to this assignment. However, I decided that I'd rather not write about it as our blogs and assignment require a lot of depth and detail. This being the world wide web and all, I didn't want to create a situation that would jeopardise the kid's confidentiality. Even if I changed all the names and was extremely evasive, Dunedin is a pretty small place and if someone stumbled upon this blog and managed to put two and two together, I probably wouldn't feel so flash about it. That probably just my paranoia, but hey ho. And so we got to dancing, which I had recently decided to start again anyway. I seemed pretty perfect, and has proved pretty perfect, so it was win win!

In the occupation and environment part of ergonomics we looked a lots of the other paractical considerations around dancing. They were things like......

• Money... lessons aren't very cheap
• Space - you've got to have room to practice
• Time - practice makes perfect!!
• Equipment and gear
 

Let me tell you a wee story that kind of illustrates some of the practical considerations of dancing.
On Saturday night I went to a swing party... wee hee! It was organised by the swing club in Dunedin. We knew it was coming up, but I pushed it to the back of my head and didn't really think I'd go. The evening started with a crash course in lindy-hop (the breed of swing we've been learning) - so even people that had never done swing before could come. Suprisingly, when I mentioned it to my flat mates they were super, super keen! There was a best dressed competition on the night, so we decided to get properly dressed up. My friend's and I spend aaaaaaaaaaall of Saturday morning in town combing the opshops. This was extremely time consuming and very exhausting. It started out as a whole lot of fun, but as we got a bit more hungry and grumpy, the fun eventually started wearing off. We scrapped the opshop idea, and went to Spotlight to buy some fabric. My super talented, selfless, creative, fantastic flatmate whipped us up some circle skirts, and suddenly we looked like we were straight out of Grease. The time that went in to even preparing for the dance was pretty intense, but can't be separated from the dance itself as we felt so much more the part!

The dance was held in an old church that has been renovated into a bar and cinema. We had so much fun, but because the turn out was so, so good, there was very limited space. I smacked into so many people (I'm not the most observant or coordinated at the best of times). We really struggled with this, and I think the organisers realised it was definitely worth considering a bigger space for next time.

This also demonstrates ergonomic properties of dancing, as the fit between the person/occupation and environment wasn't particularly good. Friend 2 and I are both pretty tall (friend 2 especially), and one of the core moves of swing - the swing out - requires a bit of stepping and spinning and space consuming. Due to the unsuitability of the environment, we did the same basic move over and over and over again as we are yet to develop the mastery to adapt the moves we've been taught to fit the environment. This wore thin quite quickly. Interesting point though - when making Caulton's (2007) "slight invisible changes" (p.93) to create best fit between the POE components, the fit can be made by adjusting any one of the components. Hagedorn (2000) says that there's a dynamic balance that is ergonomics... see my post on ergonomics. Fit could most obviously been created by giving us a bigger space to dance in... but it could have been created by us developing the mastery to do smaller, tidier moves and thus fit our dancing to a smaller stage. Or we could have flagged swing entirely and done some of that club dancing that requires next to no space. But then that wouldn't achieve the outcomes for the activity, which were around practicing our swing in a social environment and having fun: I probably would have been grumpy, so I like the earlier two ideas better.

References

Caulton, R., & Dickson, R. (2007). What's going on? Finding an explanation for what we do. In J. Creek & A. Lawson-Porter (Eds.). Contemporary issues in occupational therapy. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Hagedorn, R. (2000). Tools for practice in occupational therapy: A structured approach to core skills and processes. Edinburgh: Churchill-Livingstone.