Who Is the Master?

What copying others taught me about becoming yourself:

When I was growing up as a young dancer in Cape Town, we didn’t have much in the way of formal training or access to the world’s best dancers. There was no YouTube, no Instagram and no endless supply of tutorials sitting in our pockets. If we wanted to dance, we found somewhere to dance. Quite literally, sometimes we put cardboard boxes down on a street corner and danced on them.

What we did have were other dancers.

There were always people who had been dancing longer than us, who knew a little more, who could do things we couldn’t. We watched them closely. If they could do something that looked good, we tried to work out how they were doing it. We copied their movements, their style, sometimes even the way they carried themselves.

Looking back, those dancers were our mentors, whether they knew it or not.

We didn’t have the language to describe what we were doing. We weren’t thinking about pedagogy, technique or developmental pathways. We were simply trying to get better. Someone showed us something, and we tried to do it.

Then I started ballroom and Latin dancing, and suddenly I had access to another kind of teacher.

Videos.

Or, more accurately, videocassettes.

Sometimes they were copies of copies that had travelled from international dancers and eventually found their way into South Africa. We would watch them repeatedly, trying to understand what these incredible dancers were doing.

And I mean trying.

Because often we didn’t understand the mechanics behind what we were seeing. We saw the finished movement, the beautiful line, the picture at the end, the speed and the precision. So we tried to reproduce the outcome without necessarily understanding the process that created it.

In other words, we were copying the answer without fully understanding the question.

But something important was happening anyway.

Our standard of excellence was changing.

We were being exposed to something better than what we currently knew, and simply trying to reproduce it forced us to stretch our understanding. As our knowledge improved, we started to see the technique underneath the movement. We began to understand why something worked, rather than simply knowing that it looked good.

Eventually, we could take those fundamentals and interpret them for ourselves.

That distinction has stayed with me.

Because I think there is a stage in almost every discipline where copying is necessary, but eventually copying is no longer enough.

The strange thing about learning

I have always been fascinated by martial arts films, partly because they illustrate this process so beautifully.

You often see a group of students training together, repeating the same kicks, punches, stances and movements. Everyone is doing the same thing because, at that stage, individuality isn’t the objective. They are learning the language of the discipline.

The same thing happens in dance.

You learn your foundations. You repeat movements. You learn rhythm, timing, coordination, technique and control. You watch somebody who knows more than you and try to understand what they are doing. You make mistakes. You try again. Slowly, your body begins to understand things that your mind couldn’t quite articulate when you started.

Then something eventually changes.

You reach a point where simply reproducing what somebody else has shown you isn’t enough.

You have to respond.

You have to make a decision.

You have to trust your training.

And, perhaps most importantly, you have to discover what you can do with everything you have learnt.

One of the martial arts stories that has always stayed with me revolves around that very idea. The student is repeatedly challenged with the question, “Who is the master?”

At first, the obvious answer is the person teaching you.

(Do you know which movie? Answer below 😅😉)

But what happens when you have spent years learning?

What happens when you have absorbed the technique, the discipline and the knowledge?

At some point, the question changes.

It is no longer really asking who taught you.

It is asking whether you have become capable of standing on your own.

This is where Jung made me think differently about dance.

I have recently been spending some time exploring the work of Carl Jung, particularly his idea of individuation.

Jung used the term to describe the psychological process through which a person becomes a distinct and more complete individual. It wasn’t simply about becoming different from everyone else. It was about becoming more fully yourself, integrating the different parts of who you are rather than simply living according to the expectations of the collective around you.

And when I started thinking about that through the lens of dance, something clicked for me.

Perhaps the journey of a dancer isn’t all that different.

You begin by looking outward.

You find somebody who is better than you and you think, I want to dance like that.

So you copy them.

Then you learn more and your question becomes, How are they doing that?

Eventually, you understand enough to ask a much more interesting question:

What can I do with what I have learnt?

That, to me, is where individuality starts to emerge.

The goal isn’t to erase the people who influenced you. In fact, I think that is impossible. Every teacher, dancer, choreographer, mentor and experience leaves something behind.

The goal is to take those influences and integrate them into your own understanding.

Jung’s idea is useful here because individuation isn’t really about isolation or simply declaring, “I’m different.” It is about developing your own individuality while remaining connected to the people and culture around you. The International Association for Analytical Psychology describes it as a process of self-realisation and integration, rather than simply individualism.

That feels very true to dance.

A great dancer doesn’t have to look like nobody else.

They can carry traces of everybody who came before them.

You can see the styles they studied, the cultures they came from, the teachers who corrected them, the dancers who inspired them and even the mistakes they made along the way.

But eventually, if the development has been done properly, you can see the dancer too.

Not the copy.

The person.

Perhaps this is what a teacher is really supposed to do

This has made me think differently about my own responsibility as a coach.

It is very easy for a teacher to create students who look like the teacher. We teach what we know, demonstrate what we understand and naturally encourage dancers towards the things we value.

But there is a danger in that.

If I teach a dancer for ten years and they finish those ten years looking exactly like me, I have probably taught them a lot of dance, but I haven’t necessarily helped them discover themselves.

A teacher should provide the foundations. They should raise the standard. They should correct technique, demand discipline and expose dancers to things they don’t yet understand.

But they should also create enough space for the dancer to eventually disagree with them.

To experiment.

To find their own musicality.

To develop their own interpretation.

To discover what they have to say.

That is a difficult balance because individuality without foundation can become chaos, but foundation without individuality can become imitation.

The fundamentals are supposed to give you freedom, not take it away.

I think about those cardboard boxes quite often

There is something almost amusing about it now.

We were dancing on cardboard boxes on street corners, watching whoever happened to be better than us, trying to copy what they were doing.

We had no idea that we were participating in something much bigger.

We were learning.

We were borrowing.

We were imitating.

We were absorbing.

And slowly, almost without noticing, we were becoming ourselves.

That process continued through the ballroom and Latin years, through those old videocassettes, through international training, through years of competing and teaching and watching other dancers.

I can still recognise the people who influenced me in the way I dance and teach today.

But I am not trying to be them anymore.

I don’t think any of us should be.

We need other people. We need teachers. We need examples of excellence. We need people who are further ahead of us to show us what is possible.

But eventually, there comes a point when looking at somebody else becomes less useful than looking at yourself.

Not because you have stopped learning.

Quite the opposite.

Because you have finally learnt enough to begin asking your own questions.

So, who is the master?

I don’t think the answer is about being the best person in the room.

It isn’t about surpassing your teacher or becoming better than the people you once admired.

For me, it is something much simpler.

The master is the person who has taken responsibility for what they have learnt.

The young dancer copies.

The developing dancer understands.

The experienced dancer interprets.

And somewhere along the way, the dancer begins to express something that could only have come from them.

That is probably why I don’t worry too much about young dancers copying great dancers. I actually think it can be healthy. Give a young person something excellent to copy and they have somewhere to go. Give them nothing, and they are left trying to invent a language they haven’t learnt yet.

But we have to help them make the transition.

Because the purpose of copying was never to remain a copy.

It was to learn.

And perhaps this is one of the things I love most about dance. You can watch somebody else and think, I want to do that. You can spend years learning from people who are better than you. You can borrow from different cultures, styles and teachers. You can take pieces of all of them and carry them with you.

And then, one day, you discover that you aren’t trying to become them anymore.

You are trying to discover what you can become.

That is a very different journey.

And perhaps that is what Jung was getting at with individuation. We don’t become ourselves by pretending that nobody influenced us. We become ourselves by becoming conscious of those influences, understanding them, integrating them and eventually deciding what we will do with them. Jung described individuation as becoming an “in-dividual”, a whole that is increasingly one’s own self.

I think dancers understand this without necessarily having the words for it.

We spend years learning somebody else’s steps.

Eventually, we have to discover our own.

And when that happens, perhaps the question “Who is the master?” isn’t really a question about who is standing in front of you.

It is a question about whether you are ready to stand on your own.

And maybe, after all those years of learning, the answer is simply: “I am.”

(The answer: The movie is called “The Last Dragon - 1985)