The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Hello, welcome to the Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast. This is your host, Maia. We are getting into the start of a new year, and for a lot of us, that means kind of the second half of what I call the full dance year or the full dance season.

So if you're following a typical school year, like many dance studios do, you started classes in the fall, and what I've found in the studios that I've taught at is that now that we're getting into the second half of the season, we're going to be leaning a little more heavily into teaching choreography because we'll have a recital in the spring. Now there's so many different studio models and so many different ways that studios structure events and performances, so I understand that this might not apply to everyone, but what I'm going to talk about today is how to still focus on technique and the core concepts of dance that we really should be aiming to teach the students while working on choreography because you don't want to throw away half of your season just teaching the students certain steps in a certain order. You still want them to be learning about dance as a whole and core concepts that can apply to all sorts of different dances, styles, and even life outside of the dance classroom.

So here's just a quick breakdown of how to stay focused on the bigger picture while you start working on choreography in the latter half of the dance season. Let's talk about it. Hi again, so I'm going to come back in with the plug that I put in almost every episode of this podcast.

I feel like go back and listen to the first episode ever of the podcast, which is the curriculum planning episode. If you haven't already, this episode breaks down how I go about planning my curriculum for the whole season. And lo and behold, surprise, surprise, I go back and reference the curriculum when I'm starting to teach recital choreography.

Another episode that I will link in the show notes here that you might want to reference is an episode from my choreography series that I published previously. It's choreography week four, where I talk about the process that I use to actually break down the choreography that I come up with into little small bite sized chunks in order to teach it in a meaningful way. I tend to do my choreography in advance, if not, you know, every step in every formation, at least have an idea of throughout the music, where the dancers going to be going, what kinds of formation changes are going to be happening, what types of movement are going to be coming up at different points in the music.

And I will reference that every single week to keep myself on track, so that I don't just bowl right ahead and try and teach lots and lots of steps and forget that we need to be breaking it down for the students in a meaningful way. So that episode does talk a lot about that. But there are some other elements besides just teaching the choreography that will help you to continue to expand the students knowledge, even during a time of year when your primary goal is teaching them a dance.

So for one, we still have to have a warm up, right. And I think it's very easy to try to start to kind of shave away the warm up a little bit, or turn the warm up more and more towards, like, oh, let's mark through it a couple times, and then we'll go full out. I have definitely fallen into that trap.

Sometimes time management is just not a thing, right? Like if you have absences, and you're trying to catch up, or there's cancellations because of bad weather, and then you come back in and you're like, okay, we just got to go for it like super fast warm up and then get into it. But ideally, what you want to do is have a warm up that's consistent. And that's working the whole body and continuing to drive home those same core concepts that you worked on throughout the first part of the season, or you know, whatever former work that you've done with the students leading up to teaching them choreography, and will help them with the choreography as well.

So as much as I put into doing lesson plans for the former half of the year, and planning out my choreography, I do an equal amount of work with coming up with a warm up for every class that I teach that directly relates to the parts of their dance that I think are going to be hardest for them. Now, a lot of times that might be conditioning, right? Like, okay, I want to condition their feet because it's heavy on footwork, or I want to condition their arms because there's a lot of port de bras and movement of the arms in this. It could also be something like timing.

If you're doing a very rhythmically intense dance, and you think that that's going to be one of the biggest challenges for the dancers, maybe you can use the same piece of music that they're dancing to for your warm up and have them clap on certain beats, have them do a repetitive motion over and over and over again on a certain beat. For younger dancers, practice with the rhythm is often important. I've talked about the brain dance before.

I've used that as a warm up, but I think any kind of movement that's going to activate their brains as much as their bodies is also really important. Because with younger students, when you start teaching them steps, they're not always bad at memorizing steps, but they don't always think about it as a full dance. They're not always thinking about the intention behind it.

They're certainly not always thinking about spatial awareness, like what the other dancers are doing. Musicality can be really challenging, and so it might not be any one of those things. It might just be allowing these younger students who are still developing their sense of what dance really is all about, that there's more to it than just doing a string of steps.

So having the warm up be a little taste of conditioning, a little taste of artistry, a little taste maybe of improv, a little taste of spatial recognition, a little taste of musicality and rhythm practice, putting that all into the warm up, and then teaching them the series of steps later on in the class, their brains have started to catch on through the warm up to the fact that there's a lot more to think about than just the steps. When I'm coming up with that warm up too, and any other exercises that I'll do in the class during that time when I'm teaching recital choreography, I will look back at my curriculum from the previous half of the year, and I'll say, okay, what are the core concepts that we worked on? How and where in the dance do those apply? And then I'll start coming up with some additional combinations or technique drills or exercises that I want to incorporate, besides just doing the steps of the dance. As a younger teacher, I will admit that there were so many times that I thought the best way to quote unquote, clean a dance was just to have them keep doing those steps to that music over and over again.

Now, actually, I will get into some more sort of gamifying the cleaning process in a future episode. So I'm really looking forward to that. That's a really fun thing to do.

But that's not really what I'm talking about here. That to me will kind of come later. And that's part of that teaching the choreography process.

As far as keeping the class focused on just working technique and working on building stronger dancers, even while you're in the process of teaching them strict choreography, pull out the sections of the dance from a technical standpoint that you know are going to be challenging. And not necessarily just like, okay, let's say there's a turn sequence and like, okay, I know they're going to struggle with this turn sequence, we're going to have to do it over and over again. But we also need to break it down into a series of leg lifts to make sure they have their leg at the right height for the turn, a series of quarter turns or balancing for an extended period of time in the position.

Okay, maybe we need to do some serious work on head placement and come up with a whole combination that doesn't do any turning that's just the head, but that will then apply to that turn sequence later on in the class. I feel that dancers, if they're motivated, and you know, the vast majority of my students, thank goodness are intrinsically motivated, they want to get the steps, they will do the repetition of the steps on their own. So that's actually a pretty easy thing to assign them as like homework and be like, that's on you, you take this, you practice it on your own.

But are they practicing it correctly. So the part that's on you as the teacher is not like run this over and over again in class. But it's what are the very basic technical things that we need to break down.

Some of my students, even the older students, not not the little littles who I have said in the past struggle with spatial awareness. But the older students might be like, okay, they're good with spatial awareness, and they're changing direction a lot. But I find any age, any level, that's always a challenge.

Just anything with changing direction. If you're doing a lot of like, okay, first you face front, you face back, you face the corner, you know, you're moving on this diagonal, then this way, if it's changing a lot, that seems to be a universal challenge. I don't know if that's true for everyone.

That's just something that I've recognized many of my students struggle with. So maybe just having the students walk facing this way, then walk this way, then go this way, then go this way. Hopefully you can hear me okay, because I'm turning my head every which way as I'm saying this to try and demonstrate, but I'm realizing that I'm turning my head away from the microphone.

So I'll try to speak straight onto the microphone from here on out. But again, just really breaking it down. Or you could do one of your more challenging steps over and over and over again, but do it facing different directions.

And then that step might not be something that you do changing direction, but you've practiced the step to get the muscle memory for that. And you've practiced the direction changes or the pathways that the dancers have to follow. And you're just building up these concepts that will stay in their bodies without just building muscle memory of one distinct set of steps and nothing else.

Okay, I just have one more quick pointer. So this is really short and sweet. As I mentioned, I definitely have more techniques to delve into in the future about how we're going to tackle all of these different elements.

But I thought that this was worth mentioning in this early episode, part of becoming a dancer, right? Not just like knowing steps, but being a dancer is understanding everything that goes into a performance. So don't forget, even if you have your choreography done and you have lesson plans for how you're going to work all the different technical elements and all of the different artistic elements and teach the choreography, leave some space to prepare students for performance time. For young students, you may need a lot of time because they have no idea if they've never been on stage before.

There's so much education that has to go into what does an entrance look like? You might be in a blackout. How do you navigate a blackout? What are the curtains all about? What is theater etiquette? What is backstage etiquette? What do different stage directions mean? How do you take care of your costume? How do you take care of the other dancers around you and your own body and recognize how you're feeling when you might be having really long days in rehearsals and be able to communicate that appropriately with someone? Are there like bows that you have to memorize? Are there acknowledgements and prizes that you have to give out at the end of the year that you need to leave time for? So I would always make sure that you're leaving space and time and don't take it for granted for the older dancers either. My goodness, I mean, I know some dancers like live at the studio and have done performances their whole life, but you can still leave a little space for, you know, if you want to do some really goofy little, like I said, acknowledgements, superlatives at the end of the year, give out prizes or something like that, but also practicing a bow, practicing entrance and exits.

They might not technically need it. They might be at that point where they're like professional enough to be able to get on the spot, but it might give them an added sense of security and a little brain break and just a little added feeling of confidence stepping into the auditorium when that time comes that they know exactly what's going on. So give yourself time to work all of that into your classes in the studio, because you don't want to be throwing anything, especially at young dancers last minute in the height of dress rehearsal.

So you want them to be prepared. And again, if you're teaching choreography this time of year, and I know it's early, but like it's so soon at the same time, like it's coming. So whether or not you're in that phase yet, when you're listening to this, like it's common, right? Our job is creating dancers and educating about dance.

So yes, I'm a huge proponent that we should be like all about technique and everything, but it's not just that if you're doing any kind of performance, that is an equal part of the education and what a great opportunity. And your students are going to appreciate it and love it just as much as the technique. So you're not losing value by taking time to focus on things outside of the steps or outside of just what the body is doing.

There's always value in leaning into what a performance is all about, what a theater is all about, how to behave in a theater, all of those things. And I don't know if you've noticed it, but I've certainly noticed just in my own viewing experiences of all sorts of performances that there's a little bit less of an appreciation, I think of the magic of going to a show in a theater. So whatever your venue is, it doesn't have to be like a fancy auditorium, but I think there's so much value for the parents and the audience and the dancers in trying to give them a little bit of that magic and educate them a little bit and how special it is to have the opportunity to respectfully watch a show and take it in and value it.

And not just like, okay, I got a clock in at 2.30 to watch my kid dance. And then I'm clocking it out and taking my kid with me. Like that's not what it should be about.

Probably preaching to the choir on that one. But those are just a couple of my key tips for making sure that as we enter this season where we feel that pressure that we have to get choreography out for the recital. Remember that yes, we want to put on a great show.

Like I'm not devaluing that, but at the end of the day, the mission is about something much more than a one-time performance. It's about the education. That's how I like to stay focused on that.

And I'll delve a little bit more into the individual bits and pieces of that in the future. So stay tuned. Thank you for listening.

Thank you to GB mystical for the theme music. And some time has passed since this occurrence. However, at the time that I'm recording this, we are on the very recent heels of the passing of one of my personal dance icons.

Many, many, many people's personal dance icons, Judith Jamison. So I'm going to close with a quote from Judith Jamison. You have to dance unencumbered.

There's no other way to move. The idea of dance is freedom. It is not exclusive. It's inclusive.