I’ve liked Chuck Klosterman’s writing for a long while. He just published a new book titled, “Football.” In Chapter 3, he writes about the impact of television on memory. He writes, “The visual imprinting of television is more powerful than the visual imprinting of life.” He describes the scenario of a party, where one sets up cameras to video-document what happens. If one watches those videos afterwards, the images in the video will displace one’s memories of the realtime event.

I am on the Traffic Jam Swing performance team which will compete at the Dayton Smackdown at the end of this month. Last Sunday, at Epiphany Center for the Arts, just after the Outcast Jazz Band’s second set, we completed our first live performance. Our coaches filmed it. On Monday, I watched the video multiple times. By Tuesday, the video of the performance has indeed dominated the real memory. I have to make a concerted effort to remember it as I experienced it, and even so, the real memory is fading quickly.

Video is an important practice tool for dance. How one thinks one looks is often far removed from how one actually looks. There was a moment in the Epiphany routine where we extend our elbows so our arms look like propellors. Without the video, I would have though my arm position was fairly propellor-like. Turns out they were quite bent. On a more positive note, the video helped me gain more confidence in my swingout. It looks nice and low, and it has a good stretchiness, which helps make swingouts feel good at speed. My memory of the swingouts in real time were unremarkable, but the video brought them to the forefront of my mind.

While dancing, I constantly feel the interaction of self-perception and external perception. Dance is an expression of an internal emotional state, but that alone does not make it art. In the poem, “The Cardinal” included in his newest collection, “Water, Water” Billy Collins describes a child showing his mother a sand castle. It is the moment of sharing what is made with another person, he argues, where one becomes an artist. Dance as an artform is sharing with another person how music changes the flow of emotion through the body. Partner dances, like swing, are art forms in the sense that the partnership creates a shared expression of that music. Each partner is both creating an expressing, and interpreting the expression of their dance partner.

To dance well, one finds a balance of self-awareness. Through practice — and importantly, through visual recording — one refines the sense of how one’s body reacts to the music. But thinking too much about oneself ruins social dancing. Part of the fun is getting out of the head and into the body.

Social dancing is so much about creating memories. I have had so many wonderful shared moments with people on the dance floor over the past several years. They are unrecorded, and live on in my memory. I’m wary of recording myself too much, fearing mental displacement, but also eager to practice with video, since teaching the body to subtly change how it expresses music is so rewarding.