Thought-dancing is like real physical dancing in the way that some people love to do it, and some people don't - and that's fine. Like "real dancing" thought-dancing is best experienced rather than described, but I'm going to try anyway. I'm going to describe the kind of thought-dancing that I do with the partner who led me to think of the term. It's not a discussion, It's something more expressive, exploratory and free-form.
Choreographing with text
I usually meet my thought-dancing partner on Skype, and we tend to use text. Text is great because of the way it naturally generates its archive - so the history of the thought-dance is captured as it happens. That means we can always dance back to thoughts that came up earlier, pick them up again, play with them in various ways, embellish them, jump off them and then skip back to combine them with other previously disconnected thoughts that have come up elsewhere in the dance.
Dancing time
Another reason Skype is so good is because there are no time constraints. We just leave the channel open, and drop in when we want to continue dancing. (Solo thought-dancing is stream of consciousnees stuff.)
We don't even need to be there at the same the time in order to continue the dance (which is good as our time zones aren't very compatible). While one of us is sleeping, or working, the other can be dancing solo - leaving a trail of thoughts for the partner to pick up on and dance through later, or to just touch on lightly, or to leave alone, and jump off in a new direction.
It depends how the dance is developing.
Somethimes we'll both be online, thought-dancing at the same time, able to watch each others dance while dancing our own. Sometimes we'll take turns, sometimes we'll thought-dance simultaneously but independently, other times we'll interweave.
Rules of the dance
There are no rules, no expectations. Whether we are taking turns to dance or dancing at the same time, there is complete freedom. There are just thoughts dancing, thoughts going off at tangents, coming in at different levels, scattering all over the place, spontaneous, taking the shape they want to take, sometimes clumsily, sometimes elegantly, Some thoughts simply don't take a good shape. Others seem to have a special something. These thoughts keep attracting us back, to try them again, play with them, work on them, and perhaps even turn them into something that might be presented to an audience.
A comparatively disciplined dance
Sometimes if my thought-dancing partner and I are online togeher we'll both focus on a particular idea or issue for a while, and then our thoughts will all be dancing around that theme. A theme gives more definition to the dance. We keep coming together, then separating again, as we do when we're dancing freely, but with the shared theme we are both dancing the same dance. That kind of thought-dance is a bit like the barn dances where every now and again you dance up to your parner and swing each other around, then separate off, then come back together again. It's all a continuation of the same dance. When you connect and swing together the energy and balance are different, and each time you separate again your ongoing movement and direction is influenced by the swing. In a similar way partners connect up and separate in a barn-dance style thought-dance - but they are influencing each other regarding the dynamic and direction of thoughts, not physical movements.
Participation not performance
Most of our thought-dancing is too chaotic, disconnected and incomplete to share with anyone except other freestyle thought dancers.
Thought-dancing is not normally for performance. It's more for self-expression and the discovery, exploration and development of ideas. .
There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about thought-dancing - it's like physical dancing, and Marmite - a matter or personal taste.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.