Raiding the Vault

Posted by: candacekay on: July 20, 2012

• In: dance practice
• 5 Comments

How’s your solo Charleston coming along? Awesome, I hope! But once in a while this problem comes up, and maybe you can identify:

You’ve taken a million workshops, watched a million clips on YouTube. You’ve learned a million different steps and variations. You’ve written them down neatly in a little notebook and you’ve practiced them with all due diligence.

Yet when you get out on the social floor, you keep finding yourself doing the same few boring moves over and over. Arg!

What you need is a way to get all those millions of variations out of your mental storage vault, out to where you can access them quickly, whenever they’re needed. So here’s a way of practicing your solo Charleston and jazz steps, and it should help with that problem.

The one great secret of practicing is that there’s amazing power in doing one little thing, day after day. This technique taps into that. Every individual session need not, and should not, be extensive; what’s most important is that you do this every day.

First, dig out your list of jazz steps and variations. Or compile one from all the little notes you’ve jotted down over the weeks and months. Get yourself a nice neat list that makes sense to you. You should plan on adding to this master list whenever you learn something new.

Now every day, what you’re going to do this: randomly select up to eight of these variations, and write them on a sticky note. You can pick fewer than eight if you want, but no more than eight, okay?

The way I randomly select things is this: Start at the beginning of your list, and count down the list as many places as the number of today’s date. Today is the 20th, so count down 20 places on the list. Whatever step that is, jot it down on a sticky note. Keep going, starting back at the top of the list when you reach the bottom, until you’ve got eight items written on your sticky note. The next day, you’ll start with the next item on the list and use the next day’s date. Get it?

This system works well most days. If it keeps landing you on the same item all eight times, then just use your birthday or something. Improvising, remember?

So when you’ve got your mini list, randomly selected from your master list, these are the variations you’re going to work on today. Stick the note up where you can see it, put on your music, and then dance out these moves in any order and combination you like. The trick is that you’re limited to only this short list of moves, and no others.

You’ll find that some of the variations will work well as a “basic” – you can do them over and over again without stopping – while others only really work as a “break.” Some variations will easily work in combination, while others may require a little tinkering to get a smooth transition. Work out all these issues to your heart’s content, but only, I repeat, only using this limited selection of moves.

When you get bored or tired, stop. Throw away the sticky note, and put the whole thing out of your mind.

Next day, repeat the exercise, using eight different moves.

Repeat this every day for the rest of your life.

Tags: break, Charleston, dance practice, dancing, exercise, improvisation, improvising, jazz steps, practice, solo charleston