US Open 2015 Update #6 - Here's To The Losers!
It's over.
Can you believe it's over?
I can't.
I'm in a daze.
My mind is a chaotic jumble of unrelated images, sounds, bits of conversation jumping in and out of awareness. Focusing on a single thought feels like trying to pull a plastic telephone from a children's toy box and dragging along with it, dangling from the wire, a barbie doll hanging by her hair, a sock containing three crayons and a beer cap, the strap to a light-sabre, a purple princess costume, a dog's chew toy, a lemon lollipop, and a tiny keyboard chirping "It's A Small World After All" because the on/off button is stuck.
Sensory overload. More like "art overload."
So much art! So much beauty!
Last year's Open we were stunned. I remember going up to our room on Saturday night after Classic, and realizing we had seen, at that point, with Sunday still to go, 63 routines. The number is stuck in my head. 63 routines.
Not just 63 routines, but 63 pieces of work choreographed by people we love, danced by people we love; 63 inventions conjured from blank space, 63 creations cried over, struggled through, injured during, partnerships made and broken, sleep deprivation, music, money, costumes, coaches, hopes and dreams ... 63 of that. And we still had Sunday to go.
This year was different.
This year I woke Saturday morning feeling overwhelmed not only emotionally but physically. I couldn't stop shaking, seemed to have a strange case of full-body jitters, my thinking erratic and scattered, found myself bursting into tears at inappropriate moments.
A memory came to me. A friend describing what it was like visiting Florence, Italy, where the streets are lined with museums side to side, and each museum paintings from floor to ceiling and along the staircases and above the doors; where there is no place to lay your eyes without gazing upon such beauty, such brilliance of human creativity, that you are vanquished by it.
She called it "an overload of beauty.""
It turns out there is a term for this.
"Stendhal Syndrome" or "Florence Syndrome" is a psychosomatic disorder that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to an experience of great personal significance, particularly when viewing art, or when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world. (see footnote)
This year's Open felt not only quantitatively different (by Saturday night we had seen 151 routines, not to mention Jack and Jills and Strictlys) -- but, more importantly, qualitatively different than any year before.
This year the bar was not just raised This year the bar and stanchions were picked up and moved to a different playing field entirely.
This year was both the best in US Open history -- and also the worst. A strange comment, I know, and I want to say something about it. But first, a few words to competitors.
CONGRATULATIONS to the winners!
CONGRATULATIONS to all the losers, too! There are a lot more of you! So here's to the Losers!
Here's to all US Open Competitors - to every person who got out there and bled on the dance floor.
Losing is underrated. Competition in general gets a bad rap.
It's fashionable, especially in feminist circles, to cast competition as bad -- it's male, it's patriarchal, violent, battles, fights for supremacy, oppression, hierarchies ... all that. Competition as the opposite of cooperation, the female contribution.
That is just bollocks.
If you think girls don't love to compete, you've never watched a 9-year-old girls' basketball game. If you think boys don't love to cooperate you've never seen 8-year old boys mapping out the rules for a secret tree-house club.
Every parent knows that girls are born to compete and boys are born to cooperate; that every child comes into life with a full capacity and lust for both these things.
Competition in our west coast community is often denigrated. This last year I've seen long Facebook rants that we're "losing our souls," we're caring too much about points and placements; events are focused too much on competitions instead of social dancing. Rants that seem to be competing for who can sound the most non-competitive.
Here's the thing.
The dictionary lists two synonyms for "competition:"
"Emulation" and "Struggle."
We have two daughters. (Also two sons. And six grandchildren. But that's a different subject.)
One of our daughters played Division 1 basketball in college and pro ball in Germany.
The other daughter is a marathon runner.
Some races she'll have a pacer to keep her going when she slows down. In other races she'll find another runner just ahead of her, and for 26 miles she'll be trying to keep up or even outpace that runner.
Last month she ran with a friend in the Marine Corps Marathon. Afterwards her friend said, "So glad you were there! I beat my record by struggling to keep up with you."
That's what competition is about. That is the joy of competing.
That's why kids throw open the front door and yell, "Race you to the fence!" And one of them loses. And then they do it again! And again and again and again, racing each other until they fall in a heap, until their mothers call them in for dinner.
We are born to compete. Competing pushes us to do better, to beat the runner in front of us, to strive to overtake her. To practice harder, work longer, push ourselves beyond what we thought we were capable of, to discover our strength of will to pull up everything in ourselves.
To emulate the competition.
We need someone - a human face - to measure ourselves against. To be as brave as Mandela, as just as Martin Luther King Jr., as noble as Ghandi, as loving as Christ, as brilliant as Einstein, Shakespeare, Jerry Seinfeld, and Edith Piaf.
And here's the heart of it. You can want to win, to beat your competition, without wanting to diminish him. We want him to be superior to us, to be a worthy opponent. It's no fun beating a slow runner. We want the other guy to run like blazes, to be a champion. We want him up ahead of us, screaming along like lightning. We want him to be better than us. We want the thrill of striving to beat that.
And yes, competing means you fail more than you succeed, you lose more than you win. Learning to fail, to lose, is valuable. Every child should have multiple opportunities to lose over and over again, opportunities to learn how to handle losing. Because life is mostly about losing, isn't it?
37 couples competed in the Open Strictly, and five of them placed. 32 couples - 64 of your friends - were "losers" last weekend. Losing is a huge part of life; and learning to lose - learning to not be afraid of failing, to get back up, to keep going when the going looks bleak -- these are good lessons in life.
And yes, competition can be ugly. Because everything human can be both beautiful or ugly.
And yes, competition is often unfair. Because life is often unfair. Get used to it.
We all know too well that West Coast Swing competitions are vulnerable to unfairness because judging dance is not like judging power lifting -- a pure, objective meritocracy where whoever lifts the most wins -- no showmanship, style, bias, or technique affects your score, it's just how much weight was on the bar. West Coast Swing is not like that.
Judging West Coast Swing is more akin to judging sunsets than judging power lifting.
But competition is neither inherently ugly, nor inherently unfair.
So to those who would say, "I'm not about competition. I dance for the fun of it" I would answer "Competition IS the fun of it! Try it sometime! You might get hooked."
What makes our west coast swing community unique in both the dance and sports worlds, perhaps more than any other quality, is that we have managed to be both a competitive sport, and a social community, at the same time. We manage to accommodate both ferocious competitors, and happy-go-lucky social dancers, and to celebrate both.
So ...
To all you "losers" -- to all you competitors at this year's US Open -- we raise a glass! Here's To You! Thank you for getting out there and giving it your all! Thank you for having the courage to lose! Thank you for taking us with you on your journey!
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Technology has come a long way, so I'm assuming that everyone - meaning every mobile device and desktop computer, in every country - is able to access this website (a "Google Sheet".)
You do have to to be able to get online, however.
So.
Just in case you're unable to get to the final scores (and you even care, since scores say nothing about joy and beauty, scores are to dancing what decibel-level is to a child's laughter) -- but just in case you're interested and can't access them, here they are, courtesy of the MARVELOUS US Open Scorekeeper, "World Dance Registry," aka John Bianchi.
Stendhal Syndrome is named after the famous 19th-century French author Stendhal who described his experience in his book "Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio":
"I was in a sort of ecstasy ... Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling."
Although psychiatrists have long debated whether it really exists, its effects on some sufferers are serious enough for them to require treatment in hospital and even antidepressants. The staff at Florence's Santa Maria Nuova hospital are accustomed to dealing with tourists suffering from dizzy spells and disorientation after admiring the statue of David, the masterpieces of the Uffizi Gallery and other treasures of the Tuscan city.
The syndrome was only named in 1979, when it was described by Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini, who observed and described more than 100 similar cases among tourists and visitors in Florence. There is no scientific evidence to define the Stendhal syndrome as a specific psychiatric disorder; on the other hand there is evidence that the same cerebral areas involved in emotional reactions are activated during the exposure to artworks.