Why Free Lessons Aren’t Really Free

I had a friend ask me the other day whether they should charge for lessons in their dance organization.

My answer is almost unanimously “Yes!” and there are very few reasons to not charge for a lesson.

“But dance should be free for all,” or at least such-and-such dance should, is generally the response to charging for lessons.

The debate over free has raged along especially in the rise of digital tools, communities and services that are free or nearly free; what that means and so on has been of much discussion and vitriol on all sides. Something I don’t intend to delve into (regarding digital media).

The thing most people don’t realize is that free lessons are never free, as in gratis. Hosting a dance lesson requires work that take time, effort and skill.

  • Dance Expertise
  • Teaching Expertise
  • Organizational Work
  • Promotion Work

Dance instruction does not materialize out of thin air, even if you teach on a street corner to a group of friends (which is usually not the case).

Someone has to perform the instruction, hopefully with years of dance experience, while someone needed to have organized the space and time and managed the responses to promotion and inscription, while promotional materials had to have been created and distributed.

This work is not free, even if it is not paid for in dollars it is paid for in time, skill and effort. This is the cost of a free lesson even if no one gets paid.

Even if your lesson is free for the students, they are not free for everyone. Someone is paying the cost.

This is just one reason I nearly always advocate charging for lessons.

People are more invested when they pay for something, thus more attentive students who are more likely to continue on. Teachers and staff feel compensated for their time and effort which gives them the freedom to invest more into creating an exceptional class. Invested students, teachers and staff means better classes for everyone.

Unless you are willing to teach, organize, promote and dance as charity, which is valuable in its own right on occasion, I recommend sticking to charging for your lessons.

A Little Jazz Inspiration via Ted Joans

Jazz is my Religion by Ted Joans

JAZZ is my religion and it alone do I dig the jazz
clubs are my houses f worship and sometimes the concert halls

but some
holy places are too commercial (like churches) so I
don’t dig the
sermons there I buy jazz sides to dig in solitude Like
man/Harlem,
Harlem U.S.A. used used to be a jazz heaven where most of
the jazz
sermons were preached but now-a-days due to chacha
cha and
rotten rock ‘n’roll alotta good jazzmen have sold their
souls but jazz
is still my religion because I know and feel the message
it brings
like reverend Dizzy Gillespie/Brother Bird and
Basie/Uncle
Armstrong/Minister Monk/ Deacon Miles Davis/ Rector
Rollins/
Priest Ellington/ His funkness Horace Silver/ and the great
Pope
John, John COLTRANE and Cecil Taylor They
Preach A Sermon
That Always Swings!!

Yeah jazz is MY religion Jazz
is my story
it was my mom’s and pop’s and their moms and pops
from the days of Buddy Bolton who swung them blues to Charlie
Parker and
Ornette Coleman’s extension of Bebop Yeah jazz is my
religion
Jazz is unique musical religion the sermons spread
happiness and
joy to be able to dig and swing inside what a
wonderful feeling

jazz is/YEAH BOY!! JAZZ is my religion and dig this:
it wasn’t for
us to choose because they created it for a damn good
reason as a
weapon to battle our blues!JAZZ is my religion and its
international all the way JAZZ is just an Afroamerican
music
and like us its here to stay So remember that JAZZ is
my religion
but it can be your religion too but JAZZ is a truth that is
always
black and blue Hallelujah I love JAZZ so Hallelujah I
dig JAZZ so
Yeah JAZZ IS MY RELIGION…….

3 Ways to Release Your Creative Dancer

As dancers we’re constantly striving to create art with our bodies.

Sometimes we feel like we’re stuck in a rut, like we’re performing the same motions in the same uninspired, rote manner.

Sometimes we feel like we’re on fire, ideas, rhythms and variations pouring out of us raw and unbridled.

Creativity is a “seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity.”

~William James

How do we channel that seething cauldron of ideas?

Attempting to force creativity is akin to catch a river with your bare hands. It just doesn’t work that well.

Recent studies in creativity suggest that by recalling a time where we were free to act without worrying about doing the wrong thing, ala childhood, we unstifle the imagination. By casting ourselves as children, we unburden ourselves from the inner critic who tells us we are doing it wrong.

How then we do apply this knowledge to our creative pursuit–dance?

Visualization and Recollection

By visualizing ourselves or describing what we would do if we were seven years old, we incorporate that character into our creative process.

Take 5 to 10 minutes before creating and imagine yourself as a child, write down what you would do with your day if you had the entire day off and you were a child of seven years old.

Then go on to create.

A study at North Dakota State University by Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson used this technique to test creative solutions in a group of undergraduate students. They discovered that those students who were instructed to recall that childhood playfulness scored higher on creativity tests following the exercise than those who did not recall their childhood.

Experimentation

When creating place specific restricting criteria on your movement, or add an element to your movement that is unfamilar to your normal repertoire.

Once you have those restrictions, just go. Don’t take the the time to diagnose everything.

By releasing yourself from the requirements of knowing all of the elements or being fully comfortable with the situation at hand you force yourself to improvise.

A few years ago I danced almost solely in rubber soled shoes, but on the occasion when I was having an off night I kept a pair of leather soled shoes with me. I would change out my shoes and this unfamiliar element (slippery shoes) would release a whole different set of creative impulses that were bound up when wearing sticky shoes.

Play

Take the two exercises above and you’ll see similar elements of play in both of them.  Children play a majority of the time, we don’t have the inhibited impulses of adults questioning ourselves, we don’t know all the answers, and we’re looking to explore.

Before creating take some time to play around. Goof off, mess around, whatever you want to call it. Be humourous, take risks, get on all fours and roll on the ground. Play a game that you played growing up (four square, tag, clapping games, etc.).

Exercise the physical playfulness of the body to release the tensions that inhibit creation.

Then shift modes into dancing.

How do you release your creative dancer?

Better Dancer: How to Learn Choreography, Part 3

This is the third in the three part series on how to improve your ability to learn choreography. The first part covered tips on preparation, the second part covered tips for learning in the studio, and this last part will cover tips on how to better recall and refinement of choreography.

Getting It Right

Once you’ve gone through the process of learning a choreography the first time you’re not done. That’s only the beginning.

To be able to better recall choreography and then refine your performance of choreography requires diligence, focus and the right tools for the job.

Have Notes

Having notes, whether in a digital format (video, photo, etc.), personal notation or scary Laban notation, gives you a reference to help guide you through the choreography without having to immediately internalize the whole choreography.

They function as the blueprint upon which you can work through each section individually; they also serve to remind you of particular comments or feedback you received during instruction. Was this section expressive or stoic, intense or reserved and so on.

Learn to Mark

Learning to mark out a choreography is an excellent way to cement audio, visual and spatial cues in your mind.

What is marking?

Marking is also called walking the choreography. The idea is to perform the dance at a fraction of their normal intensity so as to reinforce their placement and relationship of movements and steps to one another.

Marking is a way of alluding to the movement without actually performing it; it’s the physical outlining of the choreography without going into depth.

By marking you can focus on sequencing movements instead of performing the movements.

Use a Video Camera

When practicing the choreography use a video camera to film yourself everytime you run it.

Instead of focusing on a mirror to check your lines while you practice, allow the camera to capture the lines for you and then watch the footage and note places where improvement is needed.

Running specific sections with various emotions or expressiveness allows you to find the appropriate character for your movement in a particular place in the choreography when reviewed on film.

The use of a video camera allows you to take note of where you may be ahead or behind the music, missing a step, creating an unanticipated shape, or moving in an unintended direction.

Filming yourself is a great tool for iterative refinement of a choreography.

Run It In Your Mind

Perhaps one of the best pieces of advice I received when learning a choreography to be performed was to run the whole choreography in my head; three times over back to back.

Visualize yourself going through the routine movement by movement in conjunction with the music (don’t actually listen to the music – it should be part of the visualization).

If you make a mistake or forget something start from the beginning. The goal is to properly perform the choreography non-stop three times through without making a mistake or forgetting a section.

The benefit of this visualization process is that you don’t have to be in the studio to perform it physically. It can be performed sitting on the bus, before you go to sleep, or wherever you have a moment to sit and focus your mind.

You’ll find that visualization combined with actual practice will improve your retention and performance more than with physical practice alone.

Have An Audience

It is exceptionally helpful to have an audience of peers, instructors or mentors to help refine various aspects of a choreography or particular movements.

The outsiders eye is invaluable in approaching the work from a different perspective and notice elements which are out of place or off. Having an open and critical discussion of the performance casts the piece in a new light for the performer, giving the performer a new view on their own movements.

What are your tips for recalling and refining choreography?

Better Dancer: How To Learn Choreography, Part 2

This is the second of a three part series on tips, tools and advice on improving your ability to learn choreography. The first part covered preparation, this part will cover tips and advice on learning in class, and the last part will cover recall and refinement of choreography.

Learn

Depending upon the level of the material and the teacher, choreography is presented and taught in a variety of ways. Whether the instruction is purely visual repetition, sequencing, or count by count; these tips helps.

Create a Blueprint

As the choreography is demonstrated, create a mental outline from what you see and hear. Mark significant changes, shifts and movements in your mind.

Having an outline or birds eye view of the overall structure of the choreography is like having the blueprints to a building. You’ve got the plan, now you have to become the construction worker – starting from the foundation to the frame to the sheathing, walls and so on until it is complete.

Break It Down, Build It Up

Choreography is in essence a sequence of movements, long or short. Experienced dancers can understand and recall large chunks of sequence quickly, while less experienced dancers understand more basic chunks.

Just like building with legos, you need to put the pieces together one by one to form each chunk and then assemble the chunks into a larger whole.

Know your chunk size.

By that, know how long or short of a sequence you can address and repeat quickly. As the choreography is taught or shown, begin with chunk sizes you can process easily (whether that is 8 counts of movement or a full phrase of music).

Start at this level and begin combining them into larger chunks.

Work on creating several larger chunks individually, then assemble the larger chunks into the even larger chunks until you have assembled the whole choreography.

Use Cues to Anchor Chunks

Develop verbal, spatial and musical cues to anchor chunks of movement to specific times, places, and rhythms.

Cues come in many forms.

Spatial cues anchor what comes next with where you are at a certain point in space. This can be placement within a group of dancers, location on a stage, or body position. By tying a chunk to spatial cues you take the pressure off of recalling larger chunks by placing chunks into context.

Verbal cues anchor what you are doing with a verbal phrase or series of sounds. They can be as simple as verbal rhythms spoken while performing the physical representation of the sound, or as deep as stories representing various movements or sections of the dance that carry one section into the next.

Musical cues anchor what you are doing and what comes next with the music being played for a piece. While not all choreographies are performed to music, many are. Knowing that a specific chunk follows a particular hit in the music, or a shift in the mood of the music changes the style of the momvent, allows you to place chunks into context.

Cues place content (the chunks of movement) with context. By understanding context we can deliver content adeptly.

Do It, Don’t Watch Yourself Do It

If your studio has mirrors, don’t focus on what you are doing as you dance it in the mirror. Focus on the experience of performing the movements correctly. The mirror is a refinement tool, not a framing tool.

Placing too much emphasis on a mirror distracts you from engaging your bodies memory.  Save the mirror for refinement – or even better, use a video camera to review your performance.

In Your Words

Whether you are using a physical dance journal, or a digital dance journal, capture each step of your learning process so you can use it to recall, reflect and refine your performance of the choreography in the future.

This note taking process puts the choreography into your own words.

Focus

When in the studio learning choreography put the rest of the world out of your mind. To learn swiftly you need intensity of focus.

Watch the lead dancer or instructor demonstrate first, don’t attempt to mimic immediately. Watch the whole presentation of the choreography, take note of the outline, the chunks, the cues. Create the outline, listen and watch for the cues, and fill in the outline with the pieces.

Focus ties all of the elements together.

What do you do to learn choreography? Leave a comment.

Better Dancer: How to Learn Choreography, Part 1

Learning choreography is a part of dance training, whether you are a social, competitive or performance dancer. It is a tried and true method for dance instruction.

Choreography may be as simple as learning a short sequence of steps as a repetition exercise, or as complex as learning a whole sequence of dances and routines for a show.

Understanding how to learn, recall and perform choreography is as much a personal endeavor as dancing itself is, yet there are some tools you can use to speed you on your way.

Part 1 will cover how to prepare yourself for choreography, Part 2 will cover tips for learning choreography, and Part 3 will cover tips for recalling and improving performance of choreography.

Be Prepared

Preparation is one of the biggest advantages you can have for learning a choreography.

Start with choreography in mind.

You know you are going to learn choreography so there is no use denying or avoiding it. Having a mindset that opens yourself up to the learning process is essential. If you believe you can’t learn choreography, you are sabotaging your efforts before you begin.

Know how you learn

We all have slightly different methods for learning, so prepare yourself by finding out how you process and recall information.  Knowing your core learning styles helps you translate the material you will encounter into something meaningful.  But in the end, remember, dance is about physical movement, so make sure not to neglect how you translate information into movement.

Know your limits and your strengths

Learning choreography is as much an understanding of what we can do and what we can’t do.  If you are learning a choreography outside of your area of expertise, recognize that and don’t set your standards based on your strengths.  If you are sitting in on a Master class choreography and are not at that level know you may not be able to perform to that level, although it doesn’t hurt to try your damnedest.

Know your steps

Choreographies are built upon the understanding of certain basic or core movements in a dance. If you don’t have solid basics and core movement you are going to be struggling from the start. Know your basics and common sequences, practice them regularly (there’s a reason even the best ballet dancers go back to the bar everyday). If you know the choreography is going to focus on specific kinds of movement, dedicate time to practicing and strengthening those.

Maintain your body and mind

If your body is shot and mind frazzled when you step into the studio to learn a choreography, you are assuredly going to stumble and maybe even get injured. Make sure to keep yourself in good health, including eating well, keeping hydrated, stretching, warming up and strengthening your body. Don’t underestimate the power of a limber and ready body.

Have your own tips to prepare for choreography? Leave a comment.

5 Thoughts, Quotes & Images on the Making of a Dancer

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

Ted Shawn

When we dance we are the paintbrush, the easel, the paints and the artist.  Each step a stroke of the brush.  Each gesture a splash of paint.  The artist as art.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Miles Davis

The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it’s considered to be your style.

Fred Astaire

Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that.

Twyla Tharp

To dance is to train, to envision, and to create out of nothing with only our bodies and space.  It is not sold like a painting or shared like a song, it is a fleeting creation, gone as it is performed.

Better Dancer: The Digital Dance Journal

This is the start of a series of articles on Being A Better Dancer.  The series will consist of articles on how to become a better dancer through the examination of learning process, creative process, and performance improvement.

I recall back when I started dancing I toted around a little spiral notebook with me to all the classes and workshops I attended. In it I jotted down notes, steps, counts, sequences and feedback. Anything that would help me along as a dancer.

It was a repository for my progress as a dancer and while some may disdain the use of journals or writing dance steps out, it helped me navigate a new domain of movement and remember the intense amount of information presented in classes and workshops.

Mine was just a spiral bound notebook and a pen, but today, with the ease of video, audio and photo capture, it can be much more. A digital dance journal may comprise dance videos of steps you have learned, voice memos of feedback, written out counts to a step, inspirational videos and songs, and the list goes on.

Create a capture process

Once you make the decision to have a dance journal, you need to establish a habit of capturing the feedback, reflections and inspirations in a way that works for you.

If you are a writer you’ll be used to toting around a notebook and pen. If you are a photographer you are used to having a camera on you. If you are nearly anyone in the digital age, you’ve got a cell phone with a camera in it. You may use a single capture medium, but more likely you will use a collection of tools to capture information for your dance journal.

Example of Capture Media

The most important part of the process is to create the capture habit and maintain it. Without a consistent habit of note taking (in whatever form) you will lack the critical data you will use to reflect on later.

Create an organization process

The capture process gives you the data, the organization process makes that data meaningful.

In the organization process you may use a series of folders on your computer, mind mapping software, project management tools, or straightforward text files. The goal is to take the captured data and place it into an overarching domain map or structure.

The domain map is a theoretical structure of the practice of dance. The map is for your own benefit so structure it as you will, but there will most likely be a few principle categories that tree or web out into other sub-categories.

Example Lindy Hop Domain Map

In each domain place or link the corresponding data that you collected in your capture process. This gives your feedback a place in the meta-view of your domain.

Don’t be afraid to move data around or add it in multiple spaces. There are many options for how you can structure your own data so it is meaningful to you. The most important part of this process is that you create a domain map or structure that makes sense for you and that you can place captured data into that map for later review.

Create a review process

The organization process makes data meaningful by placing it within your domain map, the review process creates a space to engage and work with that data.

Once you have an established domain map with various categories and sub-categories and you have begun placing data into the map you can begin a review process.

The importance of the categories and sub-categories in your domain map is that you can break apart a specific portion of the data to review and engage with without having to confront the sheer density of information in the whole domain.

Deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them.

- Geoff Colvin

In your review, take a specific set of elements or sub-category and engage with it alone.

Example:

Data Object: Learn a specific rhythm.

Action:

  • Breakdown and identify the rhythm from the data.
  • Build up the rhythm slowly from steps you already know.
  • Perform rhythm
  • Film yourself performing rhythm
  • Compare to example from data.
  • Repeat while fine-tuning rhythm to match data.

The review process is the most difficult and yet the most rewarding part of the journaling process. Identifying and engaging with the elements of your feedback process that push you just outside of your comfort zone will accelerate your learning process.

Repeat

The journaling process is a cyclical process. As you proceed from capture to organize to review, you will notice that you will be capturing, reorganizing and reviewing alongside each step. This is an essential part of the process.

At each stage you will be improving not only the various aspects of your dancing, but also the very process by which you improve your dancing. This metacognition of your learning process and your dance domain is essential to exceptional performance.

Flickr photo by StarbucksGuy.