Posts Tagged ‘solo dancing’
Homework
Posted on: April 14, 2013
Real quick, here’s a fun exercise you can try…
Stick on your music, and then proceed to make the following into an eight-count footwork pattern for yourself:
- One rock step
- One triple step
- One kick ball change
- One kick step
But here’s the thing: you mix up the order. So for example, you might do a kick ball change, triple step, rock step, kick step. Or then again, you might do a rock step, kick ball change, kick step, triple step.
Anyway, mix those four things up in any order you choose. Every combination will work out to be an eight-count pattern that lands you on the opposite foot, ready to start over from the top. Theoretically, you could use any of these patterns as a lindy basic.
Try one combination, and as soon as that’s easy, mix them up again and dance out the new combination.
I strongly suggest doing this with both lead and follow-style footwork, i.e. practice starting with both the left foot and with the right foot.
Kick it up a notch by adding an “and” anywhere in there, and you’ll have a pattern that alternates the starting foot. Know what I mean? Just go kick ball change, triple step, rock step AND kick step. Move that “and” around and you have like a million more combinations to play with.
Have fun, and stay hydrated!
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Getting Back to Work
Posted on: December 29, 2012
Okay, so the holidays totally threw off my schedule. I’ve gotten nothing done that wasn’t Christmas-related for what seems like weeks. It’s fine, it happens, I’ve made peace with it and forgiven myself. If this has been your problem, I suggest you do the same.
Now it’s time to get back to work!
Here is what work looks like for me. Firstly, I’ve been taking my business cards and flyers around to places and making new contacts for workshops and events. Nothing too crazy, just something like one new contact every couple of days or so. Cold-calling is like my worst fear, so I figure a little is a lot better than none.
Secondly, and much more importantly, I’m getting back into a routine of working on my dancing. Here’s a new scheme that’s kind of fun, and maybe you’ll want to try it:
I may have mentioned before how when I take workshops or lessons, I’m compulsive about taking notes. Actual written notes in a journal, not video. Reason being that if you take the time to write it down, your brain has to actually process what you’ve learned, whereas just taking a video, especially one that you’ll probably never look at again, does nothing much for you mentally.
People are always telling me that they don’t bother taking notes because they can never figure out what their notes mean once they get them home. And I can understand that. When I first started it took me awhile to figure out what kind of code I needed to use in order for the notes to make sense later, and sometimes they still don’t. But note-taking helps even if you never go back and look at the notes again, just because of what the act of writing it down does for your brain.
Well, I’ve been feeling like I need an actual system for making use of my dance notes. After all, considering the time and money I’ve spent taking workshops and lessons over the years, that beat-up little brown plastic notebook is the most expensive item in my house. I really should be making use of it!
So here’s what I’ve come up with. Starting at the beginning of the notebook, which dates back about five years, I’m going through each day and writing down the next ten items from the book: moves, sequences, exercises, anything I can actually practice. And I’ve picked out a short list of songs I like to dance to. What I’m doing is compiling a list of ideas that work well with each particular song, by going through and dancing out each of the ten items on my list to each song.
My idea is to work out actual choreographed solo routines, with each routine including stuff that I’ve learned in workshops but never gotten around to practicing. This gives me a built-in way to review stuff, practice choreography, and work on memorizing sequences while I work out new material for Charleston jams, demos and performances.
In the process, I’m also compiling a list of stuff I learned but can’t remember how to do, so I can ask my dance guru about it next time I see her!
So, my fellow dance nerds, if this gives you an idea you can use, New Year’s resolution-wise, you’re welcome to it. See you next year!
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Remember Me?
Posted on: October 8, 2012
So yesterday I took a private lesson as a follow. As always, I wanted to work on swingouts. And among other advice given me by my esteemed instructor (the lovely and talented Ben White from Seattle), he particularly emphasized that I should “play” more. You know, throw in stuff. Goof around. Don’t follow so robotically perfect all the time.
Thinking about that later, it struck me as odd. Because a year ago I was proudly stomping all over the dance floor, tearing things up with my crazy solo moves and hijacking all over the place. To the point where I began to annoy myself. What’s happened to me?
Add this to the fact that last week I became suddenly and helplessly paralyzed in a Charleston jam. Deer-in-the-headlights bit. Me!
And I realized, you know what? I’ve been working way too hard on leading and following. I’ve been neglecting my solo dancing.
So it’s back to that again.
Here’s my new scheme. Maybe you’ll want to try this too.
You know that bit of choreography called “Mama’s Stew”? (If you don’t, don’t bother trying to YouTube it, you’ll get nothing but goulash recipes.) Anyway, it’s a sort of line dance someone came up with, and the structure goes like this:
AAAA
BBCC
DDDE
FGFG
HIHI
J/K, J/K, J/K, L
Each line above stands for four eight-count movements. Each letter, of course, stands for a different jazz step; one individual letter means eight counts of that step. For example, in HIHI, H stands for boogie backs, and I stands for boogie forwards, and in this instance you do eight counts of boogie backs, eight counts of boogie forwards, and then repeat. Get it? In that last line, J/K means four counts of one jazz step combined with four counts of another to make a sort of composite jazz step; in this case you start to do fall-off-the-log but throw in some hallelujahs halfway through.
What you can do is use this structure to generate your own routine. As you can see, you’ll need twelve different jazz steps, A through L. You can pick these at random from your handy-dandy master list. (At last count, my list has ninety different steps I’m working on! How many do you have?)
I would suggest being totally random with picking these steps. Close your eyes and point, roll dice, or say “eeny-meenie-mynie-mo.” Because remember, the challenge is to combine things in weird new ways and to incorporate the familiar with the strange. Then plug them all into the above structure for a completely new, never-before-seen-on-television line dance routine of your very own.
I’m going to try having a new routine ready to play with when I go out to my favorite venue later this week. I suggest you try and do the same.
So what are you doing sitting here reading blog posts? Get going!
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Exercising Your Imagination
Posted on: August 19, 2012
Okay, kids. It should be clear by now that I’m a firm believer in practicing things. And in my opinion, the most important thing to practice is improvising.
It’s also the hardest thing to practice. After all, isn’t improvisation just “winging it”? Don’t you practice improvising by just making yourself improvise something?
Not in my experience. Not unless you’re a born genius. To me, “just winging it” is the surest way to get discouraged. What happens is, most of the time you just come up with a lot of incoherent junk that makes you feel incompetent. What you need is some sort of plan.
Here is the big secret to improvisation: it’s nothing more than composition. Designing or inventing things. Only difference is, it’s faster.
So to practice improvising, you practice composing. And you keep composing until you can compose quickly, on the fly. And then everyone thinks you’re just winging it.
So here is an activity to try if you want to practice composing things. In this case, a bit of choreography.
First, as always, pick out a piece of music. Keep it around three minutes or less.
Now sit down with a pen and a piece of paper, and your song playing. Set it to repeat.
First thing you’re going to do is map out your song with numbers or symbols or whatever makes sense to you; map out the entire song. We’ve done this before, check out some of the other posts in the “dance practice” category if you can’t remember what I’m talking about.
As you listen to your song, on a separate page start jotting down a list of dance moves that sound like they would fit with this piece of music. Make one list for basic moves and another list for breaks. This is just to get your brain working. Also, having this list handy will help you if your brain should suddenly stop working!
Now, go back to your map. What you want to do now is just close your eyes and listen to the music. As you listen, imagine an amazing dancer dancing to your song. Like a little YouTube video of your favorite dancer playing in your head. Watch your video and see if you can catch what this awesome dancer is doing. Anytime your imaginary dancer does something brilliant and you see it clearly, write it down. Try to write it down on the appropriate spot on your map so you remember where in the song that awesome piece of dancing fits. Keep filling in the blanks as ideas occur to you.
If your ideas suddenly dry up or your imaginary dancer runs off to take a water break, then take a peek at your list of dance moves and see where you can work some of them in.
Keep doing this until you’ve got your song mostly filled in. Don’t obsess about it – it doesn’t have to be perfect. This should maybe take you a half hour.
Now dance it out. You’ll find that some of the stuff was easier for your imaginary dancer than it is for you. Fix anything that’s awkward; fill in any gaps.
Ta-da! There’s your composition. Congratulations! The best part is, this definitely gets easier the more times you do it.
For extra credit, learn the thing. It shouldn’t be hard to memorize, because you’ve already practiced it a million times in your head. Now, next time you go out dancing, ask the DJ to play your song. Then, all cool like, go off to the side of the dance floor and dance out your choreography like it’s no big deal.
And everyone will be amazed at your powers of improvisation!
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Being the Cool Kid
Posted on: June 28, 2012
So here’s one of the ways you can make people want to dance with you: Work on your solo dancing.
This has been mentioned a time or two before in this blog, and lots of the comments agree. Solo dancing is excellent in so many ways, and if you’re having a crisis about your personal magnetism in the dance scene, there are some very specific ways it can help.
One is that it just makes you a better dancer. You learn better control of your ownself, and that’s crucially important. When things go wrong in a dance we so often blame our partners: “He was yanking on my arm.” “She was too heavy.” If people seem to be avoiding you on the dance floor, it could very well be that you’re irritating to dance with. Sorry, and I only say this to you because I love you, but the problem may be you. Maybe you are a bit hard to move, or maybe you are too rough. If you learn to move yourself properly, then at least you can eliminate this one very practical reason why your dance card might not be as full as we’d like.
Solo dancing also gives you confidence. When you’ve done a lot of solo dancing, especially in front of a mirror, or recorded yourself on video, then you can at least feel good about how you look when you’re dancing. If you have no idea how you look, it’s easy to make yourself think people don’t want to dance with you because you look goofy. Practice your solo stuff and you’ll know that at least that isn’t the reason.
But it isn’t just the practice of solo dancing that I’m talking about. I mean that you should actually take your solo dancing out to the floor. I know this is more customary in some scenes than in others, but personal opinion? I think every healthy swing dancing community should be embracing solo jazz on the social floor.
For one thing, if there’s a lack of appropriate partners to dance with, then what are you going to do, just sit around and feel sorry for yourself? You could do that at home and save six bucks. When a song comes on that you love, if there’s no one around to dance with, there’s no reason at all you shouldn’t be able to enjoy yourself. You paid good money to go out and have a good time. So have one!
Besides, doing some solo Charleston off in the corner makes you look like one of the cool kids. You don’t even have to be very good at it. People will give you credit for being out there. You’re demonstrating to the world that you don’t give a crap, and that’s extremely attractive to folks.
It also proves that you’re not just there to pick up chicks (or guys), you’re actually there to dance and have fun. That can really go a long way toward eliminating any creepiness factor that might be lurking, because honestly? People are paranoid sometimes.
Busting out your solo stuff also shows folks a little something about how you dance. Now they have more information about you than just your physical beauty or lack thereof, and your taste in clothing. They have a chance to notice your dancing, and it’s a way of sort of advertising yourself to people who might not have noticed you before.
The funny thing is that nine times out of ten, if you start dancing solo when an awesome song comes on, you won’t be dancing solo very long. Someone is gonna come over and start solo dancing with you. Before you know it, you’ll be in a little Charleston jam. Not always, but pretty often. It’s like they all wanted to solo, but weren’t brave enough until you stepped up and started it. So they’ll be grateful, and again, they’ll start to think of you as one of the cool kids.
Solo dancing is one of my favorite ways, but not the only way, to get to the top of the swing dancing food chain. Tomorrow I’ll talk about another idea.
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Dogpossum’s Awesome Post
Posted on: June 24, 2012
Through New Vintage Lady’s blog I was made aware of this awesome post on another of my favorite swing dancing blogs. It’s more than a year old, so I feel totally out of the loop, but she’s talking about the awesomeness of solo jazz dancing, and she says it better than I ever could, so just read her post and let me know what you think 🙂
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Say Something New
Posted on: June 12, 2012
Do you ever get totally bored with your solo dancing? I do. Seems like I’m always trotting out the same old tired jazz steps in every Charleston jam. You know what I mean? Blah, blah, blah. Same old stuff.
So let’s mix it up a little. If you want to try spicing up your solo movements, here’s a thing you can try:
First, what are your go-to jazz steps? Since they’re your favorites, they probably already look pretty good on you. I don’t want you to stop doing them, I just want you to take them to the next level.
For each step, look at the way you normally perform it. What does your body seem to be saying?
Maybe it’s saying “Look at me! Look at me!” Or maybe it’s something more like “Go away, you bother me.” Or maybe ” Get over here!” Or “Whatever! Who cares?” See if you can come up with a little bit of dialogue to go with each of your favorite steps.
What is your body doing to send that message? Can you tell? Chances are it has something to do with your arms. Are your arms up and out, or hanging down? Are they moving side to side, or forward and back? Are they doing something symmetrical, or is each arm doing something different? Are your elbows bent or straight? Are your hands open or closed? Are your palms up or down?
Now, for each step, try to say something completely different. If the step normally says “Yay! I’m having fun!” see if you can make it say instead, “I could care less.” If it normally says “Hit the road, Jack,” try and make it say, “Pick me! Pick me!” Try to use the same step to send a bunch of different messages.
Besides the ones already mentioned, here are a few more to try:
- “Eek! A mouse!”
- “I could crush you with my bare hands.”
- “How dare you speak to me that way!”
- “I’m exhausted.”
- “Pretty please?”
- “I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous.”
See if you can come up with a new favorite way of doing your old favorite steps.
Of course, if your steps don’t seem to be saying anything at all, maybe that’s your problem right there! But doing this exercise should fix that 🙂
Have fun!
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So last week’s challenge, about softening your gaze, was amazingly helpful to me! I found that when I was keeping my head up and looking more-or-less at my partner, without staring anywhere in particular, my turns worked better, I felt more grounded, and most importantly, it was a lot easier to smile! Awesome. Did anyone else have a similar or not-similar experience with this challenge?
This week I have a visualization for you to try. We all know we’re supposed to dance with our bodies, not with our separate parts: arms, legs, hands and feet. The famous “body leading” we always nag leaders about applies equally to followers – we need to “body follow” as well. This is the most comfortable, efficient and safe way to dance and also looks way better than steering and stomping.
Now, the deepest, most elemental part of our body is our primitive fish body, or our spinal column. As a way to encourage us to dance with our bodies this week and not with our parts, I suggest the following visualization. Imagine that you and your partner are nothing more than a couple of spinal columns. While you’re dancing, try to feel where your spine and your partner’s spine are in space, and in relation to each other.
Leaders, explore how you can move your partner’s spine by moving your own. Followers, play with feeling what your partner’s spine is leading your spine to do.
And when you’re solo dancing this week, explore generating all your body movements from the movement of your spinal column.
Well, that’s what I’m going to try this week anyway. Let me know what you think!
The Dancing Bug 