Give Me Two Bars

Start small, end deeper.

Just count to four. One, two, three, four. Now count to four twice, back-to-back. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. That’s it. That’s two bars. At least in the most common occurrence of it in the world of Western music, two bars simply counting to four twice. That’s it. That’s the space of time I was asked to fill with some kind of tap dancing when Ted said, “Give me two bars.”

I was 17 years old when I was taken under the wing of my first tap dance coach. I had had teachers, and been mentored before, but never coached. There is a difference between the three which I won’t attempt to articulate here. It is enough to say that I had never been asked to show up in quite the same way before. I had never been challenged or guided in quite the same way. Ted Levy was my first coach. He was, and I would say still is, one of the most influential voices in the tap dance world. I had known Ted for a few years and knew of his ability to bring out something different in the dancers he worked with. After a period of feeling isolated in the tap dance community for almost a year, and stuck in my own growth, I reached out to Ted. I asked if he’d be willing to, “kick my butt.” For a very reasonable fee, Ted agreed.

Being in the room with Ted was something special. He asked me the hard questions right from the start. He demanded that I show up, make the choices, and deal with the consequences. He helped me navigate my perfectionist tendencies. Ted was the one who helped me understand what the process of being an artist was. To this day I use what I learned from Ted with my own students and coaching clients. To add, all this happened with my tap shoes on.

Almost every session began with a specific request:

“Give me two bars.”

I would have to come up with some kind of tap dance step, two bars in length. If he thought I could dig deeper, he would follow up with:

“Okay, give me another.”

Two bars is not a lot of time. The ideas must be clear, concise, and poignant. There was a point to the practice. Ted was challenging me to develop a habit of finding clear, concise, and poignant tap dance ideas. When a tap dancer enters a room to practice or seek dancing there is an encounter with a blank slate. We are confronted with nothing, but have to start with something. We must have an idea and act on it to get started with the work. It might be a horrible idea, but it’s a start. Working through the horrible idea will get us to the better idea, and maybe even to a good idea. However, without something to start with, the work can’t even begin.

Ted’s request for me to find two bars gave me ownership of the very beginning of my own process. What would I find to start with? Where would my ideas put me? I was now in charge of how my sessions would begin. I was beginning to become responsible. Ted was still there, curating the value of the steps I was finding. He was helping me develop a standard of efficacy. “That step would be good if we were doing something different but give me another two bars for today.” Even in the seeking for two bars, there was intention and purpose. If I was practicing a particular physical technique, I would look for a particular kind of step. If I was working out a particular musical idea, I may look for a different kind of step.

I was often confronted with my limited knowledge, I reached for references from dancers I had known and worked with. “That’s a great step, but too much like Gregory. Give me something else.” Ted would challenge me to go in a different direction without discounting my prior formation. Ted knew how much Gregory Hines (LIINK) meant to me, even enjoyed seeing steps influenced by him come out of me. Ted would grin sometimes. He just didn’t want me to be stuck there. He pushed me into the unknown, with exaggerated encouragement, and kept pushing until we landed on something that could be used.

This is a foundational practice. Being able to quickly find a good solid two bars is part of the earliest stages of creative growth of a tap dancer. It is something that leads to a host of other creative practices. Progressions, choice-making exercises, musical explorations, and more can all begin once we have our two bars. Thinking through longer chunks of dancing happens after we have a few different two bar steps and can start linking them together. But first things first.

Foundational practices like this are key to the formation of a tap dancer. They are basic practices that allow for knowledge around how the form of Tap Dance works. In Tap Dance Land two bars is enough to get a tap dancer engaged in the ideas of time, space, tone, touch, melody, dynamics, and more! Without the practice, the engagement with the ideas never really comes to life. We may be able to think about them theoretically, but we never experience them, and therefore never really know them. Interactive relationship seems to be the only way in.

Not long ago I saw a video of a distance connection of mine explaining the deconstruction of their worldview. It wasn’t the first time I had seen something like this. In fact there are entire podcasts dedicated to the process. Seeing their video, however, filled me with admiration and deep sadness. I admired their courage in asking the hard questions and thinking through their own thinking for answers – even doing it publicly. I was deeply saddened as it seemed that their only directive was to deconstruct. There was nothing they were willing to hold as foundational.

This is not a new occurrence, even the public deconstruction (of much more than our worldviews) has been happening for years. I’ve always had a challenging relationship with the idea of deconstruction. If we engage in deconstruction to a logical end, we would have deconstructed everything and be left with nothing. Then what? People do not create anything from a vacuum. There is always an input of some sort. If we deconstruct even the input, we become at odds with the very inspiration that fuels action. We may end up bounced around by the momentum of whatever is still affecting us with little or no structure in our own person to viably accept or resist it. No, something must be foundational. If we start with a practice, an isolated low-risk experiment, that requires action, maybe we can gain some structure? But what are the foundational practices of a world view? What are the equivalent of finding two bars of tap dancing?

To return to the propositions of Jesus, if only because those are the ones that I know more than others, there seem to be a handful of small, low-risk practices, that can interrupt the current of the world around us that we are wrapped up in. Silence, solitude, and fasting, for example, starting in small incremental measures (two bars worth?) can by themselves interrupt the conditions of a person that have been formed by individual or communal factors. These practices are small physical things, that open us up to much larger ideas about our conception of reality. Fasting begs the question, “If I stop doing something for a time, will my entire world come to an end?” Solitude begs the question, “If I refrain from social relationships for a time, do I lose myself, too?” Silence begs the question, “If I stop talking for a time, will I stop being

myself?” These are deep and important questions that are difficult, if not impossible, to address directly. We need foundational practices to engage with them. We need to do something to bring the question to the forefront of our experience of life, to interact with it in an embodied way, to see what our answers truly are. Then the work can begin.

To what end? To more fully experience living in the kingdom of God. Here. Now. To make the impossibility of loving one’s enemy a light and easy prospect. To bear witness to a new world, changed by people living new kinds of lives. Can you imagine?

The work of encountering our own inner world is not easy. I speak a little about my own journey in this TED Talk. However, encountering, engaging, interacting, and owning our life with God is one of the most powerful things any individual can decide to do. Even if we find ourselves starting with a perceived deficit, hurt and frustrated, with only small incremental practices to hold on to. The benefits of laying a strong foundation for who we might become are immeasurable.