It’s taken me months to adapt the 4-sounded Tennessee Walking Step to a seated position. When my last clogging class ended, I still hadn’t gotten it. I decided in despair that the step relies so much on the momentum of a standing person that I couldn’t do it fast enough.
But I think I’ve got it now. The tricky part was making sure I was emphasizing the correct beats (the 1 and 3).
Here’s what it looks like when a standing person does it:
The other tricky part of adapting to this was that my left foot is fused at the ankle at 90 degrees, so I have to swing that leg to switch between heel and toe sounds (which is slower than simply pointing or lifting the toe). So I replace one of the left foot sounds with a right foot sound. Essentially my right foot is making 5 sounds and my left foot makes 3. But the result is the same rhythm if I do it right.
Goals:
1. Getting more comfortable with doing a continuous 4-sounded walking step as in the 2nd video.
2. Doing this while playing banjo!
For the moment I’ve gotten comfortable doing the 2-sounded walking step while playing and can pull it out at jams. Here’s what that sounds like:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdstCUP8/?k=1
I think the foot work is a nice addition, but I’d love to do more and to vary it, too, while I’m playing. A la Hillary Klug!
Learning Process Thoughts:
Imagining you are doing it before you actually can do it:
I once took an adaptive yoga class from an extremely woo, white woman in a turban who tried to explain this process: Do the movement to the best of your ability, and while you are doing it, picture yourself in your mind as if you are doing the movement the teacher is doing. Watch the teacher’s body as she does it, and imagine that your body is doing the same. This image helps you to eventually be able to do it. While I could not abide many of her other ideas, this one stuck with me.
In some ways, that is the role of the teacher. To be a sort of—temporary avatar. A sort of mold that students need to shape their movements into a form. Even if that mold is something they’ll need to shed eventually to find their shape.
Pros/Cons of Imitating Able Bodied Teachers
Even though my body is very different from the able-bodied flatfooting/clogging teachers I’ve taken classes from, focusing on their bodies and imagining that I am doing the same has been an essential part of the process. Even though it is easy to despair when I can’t do the movements that they are doing. It requires a high amount of optimism and imagination for me, I think, to buy into the idea that this able-bodied person is an image of what I can do. Thank God for the 6-year-old me who used to prance around (leg braces and all) in her Mary Lou Retton leotard imagining she was an Olympic gymnast. Glad I developed that part of my brain early in life because I probably would have given up on a lot of things otherwise.
But here is the hard part about learning from able-bodied instructors:
At some point, in order to fully adapt these moves to my body, I have to put their movements out of my mind and create a new image in my mind of my own body doing the movement. In fact, I have to spend some time with no image in my mind at all, just keeping the faith that something will emerge. It’s hard to explain how difficult this part is. Keeping the faith that I can do it, while knowing that the way my instructor does it does not work for me.
Shedding the Teacher’s Image and Replacing It with My Own
It takes an incubation period—time alone and away from my teacher—to fully learn something new. To fully make it my own.
It takes focusing on what I know my body can do comfortably, getting a good picture of that in my mind, and slowly adding more and more to it. In this case, I went back to the 2-sounded walking step, then I made myself add the 3rd sound. I switched back and forth between the 2 and 3-sounded step until I felt more comfortable. Then I stretched myself to add that extra sound, switching back and forth again and again between 2, 3, and 4-sounded step. It was like my feet found out how to do it way before the rest of me could. My feet surprised me.
And then they just . . . kept on doing it!
Kelly Moore Renwick 