Five useful life skills you learn from flamenco
Flamenco is something you can pour your heart and soul into. You can practise for hours and hours. The rhythms and melodies get under your skin because it’s a passion.
But while you’re logging away all those hours in the studio, you’re not just working on your flamenco technique. This art form has so much to give. You may not have realised it yet, but flamenco can help us learn and grow in so many ways. Here are five useful life skills you can learn from flamenco.
Resilience
Do you get everything right first try and at maximum speed? Even the professionals can’t answer yes to that question. If you’re singing, playing or dancing flamenco, you’re going to have to work at it. And for most of us that means making mistakes and picking up to try again, and again, and again. If you’ve stuck with flamenco beyond your first beginners class then you’ll know that every time you practise, some things go well and others don’t. That’s life. In the meantime we’re building resilience and the incredibly useful ability to bounce back and give things another go.
Cooperation
You don’t need a partner to dance flamenco but don’t be fooled… it’s all about teamwork. The relationship between guitarist, singer and dancer is critical. Keeping in time, following each other’s cues and improvising are all critical in flamenco performance, and that starts in the studio. When we rehearse and perform with others we’re proving our ability to cooperate and honing fundamental teamwork skills that are so important in all areas of life.
Flexibility
Not the physical kind, but mental flexibility! Because things don’t always go the way we want. Maybe as a dancer you need to add an extra compás to your choreography to make it fit the length of the letra that you’re dancing to. Maybe a dancer you’re accompanying wants a second letra when you were counting on going into a falsetta. Whatever it is, flamenco is variable and that means we all learn to go with the flow and think on our feet.
Patience
It’s easy to forget how far you’ve come in your flamenco journey but do you remember the first time you picked up a guitar or put on flamenco shoes? And how much more do you know now? To the uninitiated flamenco can seem so elusive. When I first started dancing I didn’t know how I could ever distinguish one palo from another. But looking back I can see how little pieces of knowledge slotted into place. Patience really is an essential skill in flamenco because learning takes time… and there’s always more to learn.
Humility
There are great moments in flamenco when you finally nail that move or get a piece of technique up to speed. When you get everything right. When you’re improvising and you catch all the cues and everything flows. Those moments of joy and elation when everything just clicks are partly what make flamenco so enticing. And then the next day it just doesn’t work the same way. This happens to everyone - even the professionals. No matter how much we practise, how much we learn, there are always going to be those moments that bring us humbly back down to earth. Flamenco, after all, is the teacher and we are all her students.
What other important life skills has flamenco taught you? Let us know by commenting below.
