Have you ever wondered obsessively about the best way to improve your dancing? If you don’t know the answer, chances are you’re wasting time doing things that don’t help much.
RUH ROH!
As a recovering time-waster, I can speak authoritatively about Useless Activities. And by “useless” I don’t mean vile and abhorrent and without value. I mean that these activities don’t actively make you a better dancer in most circumstances.
If you hang with me throughout, I’ll give you antidotes for each Useless Activity, as well as the one Most Beneficial Activity you can possibly do to improve your dancing.
Social Dancing
For many of us, the bulk of our dance time is social dancing.
Social dancing is good for getting into a creative flow, or to gain experience dancing with different people.
However, for most other things (like quality of movement, fixing a bad habit, breaking down a step), there are better ways to practice. In fact, using a social dance to practice such things will hold you back.
Why? It’s hard to concentrate properly at a dance (and when you do, people think you’re either snooty or constipated). Instead of getting the high-quality practice you need, you’ll end up mindlessly repeating whatever you’ve got in muscle memory. Mindless repetition is the enemy of improvement.
Think of social dances a way to get mindful repetition on what you’ve been working on. Think of them as a testing ground. Or think of them as a reward! But if you want to be the best dancer you can be, you have to do more than social dance.
Watching YouTube Videos
After watching Dax & Sarah's stunning ESDC 2012 performance, I could seriously watch videos all day.
Watching videos without a strategy contributes very little to your dancing and can suck away a LOT of time. Unfortunately, the problem again is the mindlessness of the activity.
You might say, “Hey, I’m just watching for entertainment! Can’t I have a little fun without working on something?” Even if you think it’s for sheer enjoyment, part of your brain is likely looking for something inspiring. A move that catches your eye, a routine you can share on Facebook, the secret of lindy hop. Why not make use of that desire?
When you’re watching, know what you’re looking for, take notes, and bookmark good videos. That way you have something to show for your time.
Oh, and for the love of lindy hop, set a time limit before you start! Set an alarm on your phone if you have to.
Critiquing Other Dancers
There’s only so much time in the day, so much mental space you can allocate to dancing. Why use up a lot of it thinking about other people’s dancing?
The justification is, “But I’m figuring out my tastes!” or “I’m discussing the finer points of dancing!” If that’s true, then come up with a strategy to make your critiques useful to you.
Doesn’t sound too fun, does it? That’s because “critique” is the polite term for what I’m talking about. Criticism and shit talking more accurately describe what’s normally defended as “critique.”
(If anyone needs clarification, I’m referring to the colloquial meaning of criticism—finding fault—rather than the academic meaning.)
I’m sure I don’t need to explain why criticizing other dancers is a waste of your mental capacity. Focus on your own dancing.
Criticizing Your Own Dancing
You know you have lots to work on, and you get bogged down with thoughts about how bad you are. Or how much work it’s going to take.
I’m intimately acquainted with this habit. My brain moves fast, and often I have a running commentary on my dancing. For years, it sounded like: “Ug! That was awful,” or “Ah, another mistake! This person must hate dancing with me.”
Not especially helpful, eh? You might be able to identify.
To make my brain’s constant chatter useful, I developed the “yes-no” feedback method. Here’s what to do:
- When you’re practicing something, continually ask yourself: “Does this feel right?”
- Answer yes or no.
In real-time dancing, this sounds like: “No… no… yes, no… no, yes…”
The ratio of yeses to noes doesn’t matter. They are equally useful! What matters is that you learn to evaluate your dancing in real-time without bogging yourself down.
When you have those judge-y thoughts about your dancing, translate them: “I guess that’s a ‘no’ then.” The key is letting the judgements pass, rather than letting them take root and fester.
Every minute you spend accepting your self-criticism is a minute wasted, yo.
Competing
By itself, dancing in a competition does zilch for your dance ability. It can give you useful information about your dance ability. But as a training tool, it sucks balls.
Why? Because judges are notoriously variable in their opinions. Because you’re only dancing for a few minutes total. Because chances are you won’t remember much of it, anyways.
If you want to compete, use it as a training goal. Prepare for it like you would a test. For a Jack & Jill, you’ll be far ahead of the curve if you simply spend one focused hour warming up and working on a few variations you like. Most dancers spend more time picking an outfit.
Workshop Classes
I’d love to tell you workshops and camps are the best place to get better at dancing. After all, you’ll probably spend most of your dance dollars on them.
Alas, classes may be good for learning material, but they are bad for getting that material refined and ingrained.
The bottom line is:
Mindful, focused practice is the best way to improve.
It’s the Most Beneficial Activity. If you’re going to spend time agonizing about how you’re not as good as you want to be, do the one thing actually works. Practice.
Here are two more articles from the blog “Study Hacks” that have been informing my practice lately:
- Advice On Getting Better From an Accomplished Piano Player
- If You’re Busy You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers
I’ll be writing more on the topic of practice regularly in the future (UPDATE: Check out The Dance Practice Blueprint!).
You can also get my weekly practice tips and exercises for free by clicking here.
Are YOU a recovering time-waster? Share your experience in the comments!
| Get free weekly dance tips! of your closest friends already subscribe » Learn more... |
|
||||
66 
62 
8798
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Disagree about social dancing. If you go in with the right attitude of fearlessness and experimentation and relax, you can test and adjust things you want to work on in real time, in the wild, and in a variety of situations.
Agree about mindful practice. We set up a practice group of similar-level dancers once, and drilled First Stops, invented choreography to practice stringing together meaningful combinations, and explored how to do familiar moves in an unfamiliar way. I think it’s key to form a small group of similar-level dancers, else it becomes a class.
Love your blog.
Yeah, if you’re realistic about what you can accomplish during a social dance, then it probably IS helping about as much as you think.
Thanks!!
Moreover, if you’re practicing and refining on the social floor, you’re doing so within the crowded confines of surrounding/moving dancers. Improving your lines and techniques will do very little good if it’s not executed with finely-honed floorcraft.
(interesting sidenote: my iPad autocorrected that to “FLOORCRAFT”. It knows what’s up.)
Hear hear!
Guilty of all of these… working on all of them as well.
I could chime in on any number of these but I’ll address the last one on workshops.
Workshops are a great place to work on your dancing. Steven Mitchell gave me an exceptional piece of advice years ago at a workshop, paraphrased as: “even if you’re the best dancer in the class, you should be working the hardest.” In my mind, one of the best pieces of advice ever given to me. If you’ve been to a beginner ballet bar class there are top-level dancers in there with the beginners (i.e. me) working on the core of their movement. That’s the principle in mind with Steven’s advice.
Workshops are a place where you can go and put your brain to work in long-extended sessions and focus on the fundamentals (in the context of material or what not).
Granted you need to have a set of goals when you go, have a dedicated rigorous practice already developed, and the commitment to not just float through the workshop and get some new shiny things.
I’m split on this. I know some people successfully use workshops for practice. But for most dancers I see, it seems like taking several classes a day for a few days is exhausting. For me as a newer dancer, I got waaay more input than I could possibly hold, let alone work on to a point of satisfaction.
How do you set goals in workshops when the instruction doesn’t match what you want to work on?
I think we sometimes take classes so we can be on autopilot (to a certain extent). So we don’t have to think about our goals or what we want to work on, it’s simply given to us.
Last year I was talking to Jean Ma about how I really needed to improve my musicality, and she said something like “Well, when you’re sitting around, at work or at home, listening to music, try to visualize the moves or variations you’d want to do in response to what you’re hearing in the music.” And I realized in that moment, I wasn’t really able to recite the language of lindy hop just within my own head. I wasn’t fluent enough yet. And anything I could do to increase my fluency was gonna help me become more musical, and more improvisational. Turns out, those high-intensity workshop weekends where you’re completely knotted-muscles and braindead at the end? They’re an excellent immersive way to really get fluent in the language of lindy, and ultimately get to the point where you can translate music to dance, on the fly, in your head. So yeah, those workshops are a means to an end, and they’re really effective for people like me.
Some great thoughts here. I really need a separate post about how to get the most out of workshop weekends. They can really go by in a blur. What do you do to make the information stick?
I volunteer all around my local scene to help get class recap videos of the events. And when I’m not personally responsible for the videos being posted to YouTube, I try to poke the organizers to get them posted at some point. And while sometimes there are nuances from the classes that don’t get captured in the videos, I at least remember those nuances when I watch the videos.
We occasionally have practice sessions at a friend’s place, at which I can try to impart the things I learned at the workshops, either to people who weren’t there, or to practice with people who were.
For me, immersive workshops have been the most effective means for improving my dancing. My most recent workshop was Beantown Camp in Beverly, Massachusetts, seven days of track-based instruction and social dancing. Beantown may be special in that it’s so well organized. The trick is being honest with yourself about which of five levels you belong in. From there, you can pretty much go on auto-pilot — the instructors have a clear plan for the material, quality of movement, and choreography your track will be working on throughout the week, and the quality of instruction is as good as it gets. Our track instructors were Peter Strom, Naomi Uyama, Evita Arce, Michael Jagger, Mike Roberts, Laura Glaess, Nina Giklenson, Sylvia Sykes and Skye Humphries. All tracks go from zero to performing on stage what they’ve learned throughout the week on the final day of camp.
With 4-5 classes per day, it can be overwhelming to remember everything you learn. This year I created a private Facebook group for our track. After each lesson, we filmed ourselves, posted the videos to Facebook and used the comments section to discuss everything we learned. For the performance, a number of us took turns writing out all of the choreo and posting it to the group. This allowed us to learn and retain 10-12 new eights per day. We’ll be able to go back to the group again and again for a refresher.
There’s also something about registering months in advance for a workshop, paying the money, flying across the country, arriving in another location, having an entire week blocked out for nothing but Lindy Hop, being part of an equally motivate group of people learning from the pros that puts me in the space of “I’m here to work on my dancing.” Of course, there’s a lot I could do locally and on my own too, but immersive workshops like Beantown have been the most effective for me.
Another thing that helps more than you might expect: get stronger. Lift heavy weights. Develop core strength, do deep squats. Do pull-ups. Back strength is probably the biggest one, but leg strength will help too.
By way of example, before I started working out, I had a hard time with hesitations, largely because in order to do them, I’d have to plan. If I didn’t set up a hesitation at least four, usually eight counts before hand, my momentum, and my follower’s momentum would just push us past the hesitation spot. With a little more strength, I can bring our partnership to a pause when and where I want to. And this doesn’t just go for full hesitations, but any sort of momentum shift. With some extra baseline strength, it’s easier to adjust the momentum of the dance.
I don’t have as much first hand experience with it, but from what I’ve seen, the same principle holds true for follows.
Lindy hop is an athletic dance, and having the physical strength to support that athleticism can make a big difference.
“With a little more strength, I can bring our partnership to a pause when and where I want to.” I’d never have thought of you as ‘not strong.’ :-) Just goes to show that weaknesses can be revealed in unexpected ways.
As a follow, I can say it also works for us, too. One example: developing glute strength helps me land aerials properly.
Excellent advice, Cliff. That was my exact thinking, and I eventually became a powerlifter *because* of Lindy Hop.
As you get stronger and are more aware of your muscle activation and body alignment, it becomes significantly easier to apply whatever dance moves/movements you’re learning or practicing. The extra strength will make every movement effortless, which means you look better, and the improved posture is always a great bonus.
Strength will open the doors to many possibilities you never thought you could do.
My standard advice for people who want to exercise to improve their dancing is: deep squat, pull-ups (or rows) and kettlebell swings.
Depends on the way you think. Additionally, it’s really dependent upon what your end goals are for dancing. If you want to be a stronger social dancer, then social dancing is probably very beneficial.
I have practiced for hundreds upon hundreds of hours and feel that most of my improvement has come from other, less structured methods. I think a rigid practice regimen is more valuable for those that approach dancing with a more analytical perspective.
Rebecca! This list is great because it is counter what many people practice. Let me make exception, and forgive me if this seems to be nit-picking: Social dancing is a major source for ideas for the improvisational nature of Argentine tango (and really all dance when done by really listening to the music). I name the movement idea after the woman and write down what happen. Also, what worked perfectly well in a focused practice session or a private lesson may not work on the social dance floor but may find it’s solution there. The analogy to the social dance floor for a jazz musician is the jam session. I hope you would not suggest that the social nature of a jam isn’t really going to do a musician much good. But you DO have a good point. The other area is “workshop classes.” Worthless UNLESS you do it with someone who will practice with you later. It may all be forgotten with a partner to revive it. Also, there is SOME value to being exposed to something at a workshop. Bravo on the general concept and challenge to common wisdom!
Wonderful, thank you for the comment! Social dancing and workshops definitely ARE good for something, but you have to put your mind to it if you want to make the most of them. If you just want some entertainment, then you won’t care whether you meet your full potential in your art, and this whole blog post will be boring. :-)
Ya you got to figure though doing anything is prolly better than doing nothing. Still I think practicing with goals in mind such as I want to make finals in this next competition or look good in an upcoming performance is alot more motivating then I just want to get better.
I’ve kinda learned to make workshops work for me. What I do is, whenever they’re teaching something that seems important, I step out of the rotation, go grab my notebook and write everything down. I don’t even try to learn it or practice it until I’ve written it all out. Then I’ll step back into the rotation, try it a few times to make sure I’m getting what they’re saying, and then go write more if anything needs clarifying.
I don’t try to write down everything, just the couple three things that seem really useful. Then when I go home I review it, think about it, practice it a little every day. I don’t just expect to learn things at workshops and retain them – I’m intentional about taking notes and practicing. Without notes, workshops are a waste of money as well as time.
Rebecca, have you read The Inner Game of Tennis? I’d be curious about your take on it.
I bought it for Paul’s birthday, actually. Haven’t read it yet.