Skill and Authenticity in Artistic Performance
Alma Aguilar has identified two competing accounts of what happens in (adroit) artistic performance (specially improvisation), for example, in dance: An openness to expressing our natural and true self. The automatized manifestation of expert skill. In the later tradition, to learn to dance is to learn to acquire certain specific skills that are both corporeal and intellectual. We not only learn how to move our bodies in certain precise ways, but we also learn how to think , i.e., what to pay attention to, how to look at space, how to relate to our bodies and to other dancers’ bodies. In training and practice, dancers acquire a new and sharpened awareness of their own bodies and their place in space. It is the acquisition of these skills that later will allow us, on stage, to perform adroitly movements that will come out automatically, despite not being truly instinctive. In the former tradition, in contrast, learning is fundamentally a negative process: to learn to dance is not s