Like many others, I watch and study lots of house dance videos. I’m still very much a beginner when it comes to the craft — at the time of this writing, about 14 months into the journey — however I’m noticing an increased ability within myself to tease out what highly skilled dancers are trying to convey in their rounds. Because I recently started training privately with Mavinga, I’m leveraging the opportunity by attempting to analyzing her videos and then coming up with questions that I can ask her since it’s rare and a wonderful opportunity to sit with the person and have them articulate what they were doing in a particular round. In particular, I like the below video (hopefully YouTube skips to the specific time frame I embedded in the URL) where Mavinga catches a particular phrase in the music and then (I think) signals to the battle opponent that he missed an opportunity to play with musicality or perhaps she’s trying to convey something along the lines of “Did you hear that? Maybe not.” It’s playful.