The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Welcome to the Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast. I'm your host, Maia. No matter who, what, or when you teach, I'm here to share all my best tips and tools, along with real and practical conversations with fellow dance educators to help you be the very best dance teacher you can be. Let's talk about it.

Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining me for today's episode.

I'm totally tooting my own horn here, but I think it's a really good one. I have a ton of ideas jotted down in front of me. I'm hoping I can stay a little bit focused, a little bit organized with this, because I really just want to rapid fire a bunch of ideas at you to try and help you with the teaching recital choreography.

I know that's coming up. And today we're going to be talking about props and tools that I like to use in the classroom when we're working on learning that recital choreography. I did a props and tools episode way back in season one, like the very beginning of season one.

And still to this day, it's one of the most listened to episodes. I think dance teachers just love having those simple ideas to engage their students in new and unique ways. And as soon as you bring out an item that is novel to the classroom or to that situation in the classroom in some way, even if it's something that's in the classroom all the time, which a lot of these ideas are, when it comes out in a new way, all of a sudden, the students are curious, they're engaged.

And that obviously helps us as teachers. So that's really what I'm talking about today. Let's just get right into it.

I want to start with ideas that are best for the younger students. I am pretty confident that your older, more advanced students are not going to need any of these props and tools, but I promise I will get to them later on in the episode. So the first one is just place markers.

That seems pretty obvious. If you have rubber dots or place markers of any kind, I'm sure that you have used them for your littles before. But I just want to encourage you not to forget about using them when you're teaching recital choreography.

If you don't have place markers, you can also use tape on the floor. So very simple. But especially with the younger dancers, I like to have some kind of place marker for them for any and every place that their body is going to be throughout the course of the dance.

Under about six years of age, they are still learning spatial awareness. And it's really important to give them as many visual cues as we can. So putting something on the floor for their opening pose is great, but then make sure that you continue to reinforce their placement, moving the place markers or putting out new pieces of tape every time you start to work on a change of formation or a new spot for them.

And with those younger ages, I've talked about this before, you don't want to do a lot of changes of placement. I like to kind of correlate that with their age. So at age three, they wouldn't have more than three different places on the stage within their dance because they are really, really just learning, they might just be in one and that's fine.

Up to age six, maybe they're going to be in six different places, like have an opening pose, then go to, you know, a two line formation, which might shift into a circle and then open back up into a line, then a closing pose, something like that. So you'll have a few more shifts in there. But again, I'm using some kind of place marker to show them exactly where those are.

And even as you get into a little bit older age group, a little bit more experienced dancers, I will still use those place markers. I like to turn it into a game once they've learned all of their formations, they've learned their choreography, kind of like musical chairs. So I'll put place markers out, especially if there's a quick transition, you have a big group and they have to get to a very specific formation in a short period of time and you're trying to make sure it's very precise.

Put the place markers in place first, then put them in whatever their previous formation is and say, okay, I'm going to play the music. When the music stops, you must freeze. And when that freeze happens, it's a great time for them to look in the mirror or for you just to assess them and say, is everyone very, very perfectly placed in their spots? Another one for young kids that I've also talked about before, but I really like to use this in recital choreography because inevitably with my just beginning dancers, there's always at least one or two spots in the choreography where they just cannot remember which foot they're supposed to step on first or which arm they're supposed to pick up first or something like that.

Getting a couple cheap packs of scrunchies and using scrunchies when working on a specific section of the dance. So everyone gets a scrunchie around their right ankle, for example, for a section in which everyone is supposed to step on their right foot first, but they keep accidentally stepping on their left. Or let's say you're supposed to put the right foot in front first and they keep putting it behind.

Having the tactile cue in this case of having a scrunchie around their wrist or around their ankle is a great reminder. And then hopefully their body will remember that tactile input. So when you take the scrunchie away, you're still getting better results of having more dancers on the correct foot.

And I'm never going to say everyone's on the right foot because for the younger beginning dancers, that is never my goal with recital choreography. I pretty much go into it with the mindset of, yeah, kids are gonna be on the wrong foot at some point. It is what it is.

But we're trying to get the best results for the most number of dancers. Okay, this next one is great for littles, and you probably already know that it's great for littles. I also use it for every age, every level.

And I've talked about it before, so maybe a little redundant so far, but we're getting into it. I promise I have lots more for you. And this is, I put these two together, but I lean more towards one than the other, but a sticker chart or a felt board.

I've talked about before why I really love my felt board in place of a sticker chart. And I made my own for a couple bucks. I don't expect everybody to do that.

So just taking a piece of paper and slapping stickers on it works fine. But a felt board that you put up at the front of the room or in the corner of the room and you have pieces of felt to me is just so much more reinforcing. And I'm talking about every age.

I'm not joking. Teenagers can get into this, so don't write them off as like not needing these fun little tools and props. So number one, probably the first thing that you're thinking when you hear sticker chart, felt board, is we're using this for reinforcement.

Absolutely. Throughout the class for young kids, it can be reinforcement for anything, like don't talk. And if you can go three minutes without anyone talking out of turn, you get a sticker.

During recital time, I'm most commonly using the sticker reinforcement to set a goal like let's work this section of the dance at least five times. And I'm going to give you a sticker for every time you complete that section of the dance. And once you get those five stickers, then we get to take a break of some kind, play a little game, get some kind of reinforcement.

It might also be we're going to run the whole dance. If you're really getting into memorization and conditioning mode and you're getting closer to recital and they know the dance, but they just have to get it down. We got to run this whole dance five times by the end of class.

You're going to get a sticker for every time. And at the end, once we've achieved that goal, then everyone gets their own individual sticker or something like that. And again, the reinforcement, although you are going to up the stakes, up the goal a little bit for your older dancers, you can still do a sticker chart for them and have some kind of little fun thing for when they reach their goal.

And I think that's a great way to reinforce for these dancers who probably have learned a little bit faster and put in more work. Why shouldn't they get some kind of fun reinforcement like that? Now, the other thing that I use the felt board for, and I've always just used it with just generic felt pieces. Again, you can absolutely do this with a piece of paper with stickers, but I love the idea if you are like a little bit more of a Pinterest dance teacher than I am of actually cutting out like little ballerina shapes.

I say that because I'm a ballet teacher, but bodies, you know, doesn't matter what they're if they're dressed a certain way for a certain style of dance or whatever, but like paper dolls, like cutting out little human shapes and then using them to create the formations of the dance. So this also really helps with retaining the different formations of the dance. It helps younger dancers with understanding spatial awareness and what the layout of the stage is meant to look like, not just being aware of their own bodies, but the formation that they're creating with their body as well.

And you can also use these shapes on a piece of paper or on a felt board or whatever you're doing to demonstrate stage directions, make sure your dancers understand stage directions to demonstrate, hey, here's where the wings are, right? You can have a little piece of felt for each of the wings. I'm thinking about like how, and this is not my area of expertise. I'm probably going to really embarrass myself with this, but like how you would see like a football coach going through play diagrams.

That's what I'm thinking. You can use this felt board or a chart of some sort for to walk your dancers through. This is what this is going to look like and make sure that they have an understanding of everything from when they're back in the wings offstage, where are they coming out on the wings, understanding every formation, understanding how they pass each other without hitting and then getting back offstage at the end.

So a number of different things that you can do with a sticker chart or a felt board. Again, I love having the felt board because it's just big, you can see it, you can slap a piece of felt up there as a reinforcer and it's really exciting because everyone can see that happening and it's reusable, sustainable, all that good stuff. This next idea also kind of goes with that football analogy.

I feel like this is a great way to test out the dancers actual intellectual understanding of what it is that they're doing on stage. So this would be for not your youngest dancers, not your most beginner dancers, but could be used for a variety of ages and that's to make flashcards representing different parts of your dance. There's a lot of ways you can do this.

You can write down vocabulary if it's a pretty basic dance. Just write down the names of steps that are within the dance. If you have a lot of elaborate choreography, maybe you do what I do, which is use really weird words or phrases to sort of represent different sections of the dance.

So my dancers would know like, hey, go to the top of the flower section. And I've explained to them why in my mind that's the flower section. So they're like, okay, sure.

So I could write down a flashcard that says flower section and then another one that says opening formation. Another one says ending formation and, you know, just representing the different sections of the dance. Or if you are working with younger kids, maybe you could use pictures that represent a step and or pose from the dance.

And you could show the dancers the flashcards and have them call out what comes right before that or what comes right after that. Or say, when I show you a flashcard, I want you to sing the music that is playing during that section. Or hand them the stack of flashcards and say, I want you to put these flashcards in order to represent the flow of the dance.

So we're taking an intellectual approach. You just never know which of your students need that kind of approach to really confidently memorize. I'm sure a lot of your dancers are familiar with memorizing all sorts of things for school using flashcards.

So taking that approach to learning choreography is a great way to access some of the different parts of the brain that they're not using when they're just using muscle memory. Let's kind of pivot for a second from that intellectual approach to more of an artistic approach. How can we use props and tools to build the artistry and the performance quality of the piece? One thing that I've noticed with my dancers in the past is that if I have a dance that's very heavy on traveling.

So again, this is typically going to be a little bit older, more advanced dancers because my youngest ones don't travel around the stage very much at all. They're just demonstrating their skills in one to a few set formations. But when I have a piece where dancers are interweaving and they're having to travel, or maybe it's a solo, and I'm really wanting that dancer to like eat up the stage space, sometimes that can really be a struggle.

The dancers are trying to find the path of least resistance and that's not always fitting with my choreographic vision, right? So this is where I would grab anything that's already in my studio. I'm thinking of chairs. There's always chairs in the studio, at least a couple out in the waiting room or something.

And I'll pull those chairs in and put them in the places where I want there to be negative space where I don't want the dancers to ever go in that area. And I'm setting chairs there and I'm like, okay, run this section again. And you are not to go anywhere near that chair.

That's just a way to encourage the dancers to really carve out the space, use as much space as possible, not get too close to other dancers or areas where you don't want them dancing. I also might hang something up on the walls or write some get permission from your studio owner before you do this. I don't want to get in trouble but write something on the mirror if you have permission to do that to get dancers to project up and out to the mirror.

Say, look at this motivational quote that I wrote up at the very tippy top of the mirror. That's where I want your eyeline to be. That's where I want you to lift your chin to look at this poster that I hung up and not just necessarily at the front of the room.

I'm talking about the mirror. But then again, if you're having a traveling section and you find that your dancer keeps cheating her face out to the audience because maybe she's more of a like a theatrical jazz dancer, and you're trying to get her to do something that is a little more contemporary where it's not just all about the audience and the fourth wall, hang a poster over on the side where he or she is traveling to or hang various things around the room to create various different focal points to say, okay, at this point, you need to be looking at the poster of the red flower. And then for this section, you need to change your direction, move your whole entire body towards the blue flower.

And then for this next section, we're going to cheat a little bit out towards the purple flower, right? So using those visual cues to try and get the dancers to connect with something beyond just the walls of the studio. And then some additional tactile cues that might help you. If you can, this is one where it might just be a barrier.

I don't know what you have access to. But if you're having dancers that are kind of dropping their gaze, dropping their head, not holding their head up, if you could find some kind of crown or something to place on their head to try and have them hold it on their head through the whole dance, that can be really helpful. And that also leads me into various props that you can use to elevate the performance with the dancers arms.

So I have traditionally found that I struggle with arms a lot. Like I've taught ballet, modern and jazz. And I think clarity of the movement of the arms across all those styles across all the years and the classes and the levels that I've taught has always been something that I really feel like I'm needing to work on and clean more for the recital.

So a couple things that I have done ideas that I have for you. And it's really going to depend on like the style of your dance and the vibe of your dance. But if you are trying to just condition arms, because the dancers arms keep drooping like end of the dance.

So whatever style it is, have the dancers run sections of the dance, the whole dance or phrase work from the dance, holding very low weight, little dumbbells like one or two pound dumbbells in each hand or a water bottle in each hand, or something that has some weight to it. That's just going to help with conditioning and endurance. But if you have a dance that has a heavier feel to it, where you want the dancers to really feel weighted into the ground, you could also have them hold these weights just to get that kind of feeling.

If you have a lighter dance where you're finding that the dancers arms feel a little bit heavy and weighted, and you want them to be much lighter and airier, you could have them just very lightly pinch a feather between two fingers on each hand and dance the whole dance with these little light feathers in their hand. Notice how my voice is changing so much talking about holding a feather between two fingers because it changes the whole dynamic of the entire body internal and external. Hopefully that's not just me.

I mean, I, I definitely have that like kooky artist thing where maybe that's where I'm connecting with it. But hopefully your dancers do too. That's what I hope and pray for every dancer that they become a kooky artist because it's just fun.

Why? Why wouldn't we be right? Another idea that I had would be to give them scarves. Scarves give such a nice light airy feeling and hopefully by holding scarves in their hands and weaving them around with the movement of their arms, that will translate into the rest of the body to where they're moving in a much lighter, more buoyant manner. And if you're doing more of a theatrical or a funky jazz dance or any kind of dance that has a really sharp arm movement, maybe have them hold a towel or a piece of fabric of some sort and they have to like actually whack that towel out every time they have a sharp arm movement.

I have also, genuinely I have done this. Again, clear this with the powers that be before you do it because maybe it's not the best idea in the world, but within a controlled environment where I felt like it made sense and nobody was going to get hurt and it worked, I've had dancers actually throw a tennis ball across the room as hard as they could doing certain arm movements. And once again, that might be where like my little kooky artistic side comes in because I'm a modern dance teacher and you know how modern dancers are.

So I'm like, no, when you scoop the arm over the head, you have to throw the tennis ball as far as you can over your head. But sometimes you need that tool, you need that tactile input to really drive the point home. And another thought just occurred to me, which is a tennis ball, which is again, maybe not the best idea, could also be replaced with a balloon, which is not going to go very far and not going to hurt anybody.

But if you only blow the balloon up a little bit so it fits in the palm of their hand, and then they have to throw it when they're doing various movements, that could also work just as well and nobody gets hurt. My last prop slash tool idea is something that again, maybe is not within your jurisdiction, if you're a casual dance teacher like me to provide to the students, but I think can very easily be provided. First of all, if you or your studio does want to provide this, you can find big packs of them very inexpensively.

And or you could also ask your students to provide their own. And that is a journal of some sort. So throughout the process of learning their recital choreography, you could ask students independently or just during the first five or the last five minutes of class to do some journaling.

And that can include anything from write down the corrections that you got today. So you can go back and look through what it is that you need to work on. It could be write down the choreography that we learned today.

So you have notes to practice from of exactly what the steps are. It could be write down the thing that you felt the most confident about in today's class, the step that you like the best, the thing that you feel like you're doing really well to give them those moments to be excited about when you're throwing so many corrections and so many things for them to work on, to make sure that they are dwelling on the things that they're doing well, and that they love about their recital dances, and why they do what they do. It could, of course, be what is the one thing that you feel you need to work on most from today's movement.

Another thing could be what props and tools that we use in class today, and how did it help you enhance your performance, something like that. Or you could just even ask or allow them to free write for a couple minutes, anything that they want. You don't need to look at it can be like personal to themselves.

But just say, hey, let's reflect on today's class. What are you feeling? Take two minutes to write and then we're going to do reverence or we're going to do closing circle time or take a bow or whatever it is that you do to close the class. If you don't have the bandwidth to do that within classwork, you could always just encourage students to do that independently, get their own journal, things like that.

But I think that's definitely a valuable tool to implement during this time when dancers are hearing so many things and learning so many things and trying to absorb so many things within a short class period. Make sure they have some way to kind of try and put that down on paper to process it at some point. That's what I got for you for today, guys.

I hope that was really helpful. This time of year always excites me so much. I just really love delving into choreography with students specifically.

It's such a different beast from like concert choreography, but it's just so rewarding and so fun in so many ways to see the way that students are shaped and grow by learning choreography. And I never ever want any student or teacher to feel like the process of teaching and learning recital choreography is a drag, that it's redundant, that it's not engaging, because it can get like that if you don't have a lot of different tools to lean on. So those are the props and tools that I think are the easiest and the best to use this time of year.

Please, by all means, share any that I missed that you've been really enjoying using or if there's anything else you want me to talk about, about making the choreography process more enjoyable and engaging. I obviously would love to do that. You can find me in the Casual Dance Teachers Network on Facebook.

That's a Facebook group. I'm also on Instagram at the Casual Dance Teachers Podcast. I would love to hear your review on whatever platform you're listening to the podcast about today's episode.

And as always, I want to share my thanks to GB Mystical for the theme music. To close today's episode, I want to share this quote from Wendy Whelan, who said, "Don't think about tomorrow. Don't think about yesterday. Think about exactly what you're doing right now and live it and dance it and breathe it and be it."