Swing Dynamite Blog
Thoughts and news about swing dancing in Ottawa
Great Dance Teachers Need to Struggle
[ No Comments ] Posted by byron on Apr 10, 2011 in Learning Swing Dance, Teaching Dance
You can be born with a gift for teaching, but it takes struggle to become a great teacher–especially in dance.
There’s a famous saying: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.
In the swing dance world, it’s simply not true. For one thing, in order to show people how to dance well, you need to be able to demonstrate what great dancing looks like. But beyond teachers being inspiring role models, making a living as a swing dance performer alone is virtually unheard of. So those who want to live as professional swing dancers have to teach for a living. If you’ve ever attended university, you may recognize the problem here: the profs who do the most brilliant research aren’t necessarily good at teaching. In fact the two things are at odds. Why?
If you’ve never struggled with a concept, then it’s hard to relate to people who find it difficult. To teach something very well, you need to have a vast array of tricks up your sleeve for every student and occasion. One of the ways to acquire a large repertoire of teaching techniques is by struggling with the material yourself. If you’ve always had great posture, then you might find it hard to go beyond telling hunching students, “just don’t DO that!” But if you danced for years with bad posture, trying to fix it but always fighting the bad habit, then you probably had to try a lot of different tricks to fix it. Maybe you tried focusing on the muscles in your back you needed to use. Maybe you used acting techniques–”think PROUD.” And maybe you discovered that your bad posture tended to be a problem particularly in certain moves, like the sugar push, which made you realize that it wasn’t so much a pure posture issue as a misunderstanding of when to connect and stretch so that your shoulders weren’t pulled forward.
All of those trial-and-error experimentations would give you a strong background (*ahem*) in fixing dance posture. And that’s why often teachers are best at teaching their own weakest areas and sometimes almost useless at teaching what they naturally do well.
Does that mean that you can’t teach something you found easy the first time? Not at all. But it means you still need to STRUGGLE. Continue reading “Great Dance Teachers Need to Struggle” »
8 Cheap Tricks For Getting Good
[ No Comments ] Posted by byron on Jan 03, 2011 in Learning Swing Dance
Dance lessons can get expensive for the extremely addicted swing dancer. If you’re looking to get the most bang for your buck, here are some “cheap tricks” to becoming a great swing dancer!
- Mirrors – Simply make sure you get regular time in front of a mirror. Unlike video (which is also great), mirrors give you immediate feedback about how close your movements are to what you think you’re doing. If there’s a single inexpensive dance tool to recommend, this is it. Cost: $20 or less.
- Social Dancing – This should be obvious, but the more social dancing you do, the more natural the movements become. Cost: $5-$20 depending on dance night.
- Going Solo – This comes in two parts. For one thing, practice all of your partnered footwork patterns all the time, on your own. The key is frequency. If you’re a beginner, practice your basic footwork patterns once a day for just ONE minute, and you’ll see amazing improvements. Don’t let a day go by without dancing! Cost: FREE!
- Solo Dancing – The second part to the solo equation, work on just moving to the music. Solo Charleston & Jazz is great for Lindy Hop, and Hip Hop style movement can inform your West Coast Swing. It’s all about getting a groove on so that you feel comfortable and confident. Steal moves from Youtube, try them in front of your mirror until they look good. Cost: FREE!
- Trade Secrets – Exchange moves & styling ideas with your other dancing friends. If you don’t ask too often, people will often take it as a compliment that you like their moves, and if you reciprocate they’ll be even happier. It’s also a great way to make friends. Cost: FREE!
- Partner Up – Finding a dance partner doesn’t need to be a big deal. Don’t ask, “wanna be my dance partner?” Instead say, “hey, would you guys like to get together to work on these moves we learned today?” Cost: FREE!
- Group Private Lessons – You can get almost the same benefit out of private lessons even when you take them with other people. I recommend always taking private lessons with a partner, because they’ll be able to help you practice the new things. Just make sure the teacher doesn’t focus on helping you “dance well together” (as though you were entering a competition together) at the expense of becoming better overall dancers. Cost: $25-$75 per hour
- Take Notes – Great dancers tend to take both written and video notes. It’s good to develop your own symbols and terms for note-taking. And once you’ve taken the notes, practice the stuff with a partner or the notes will become an ancient, indecipherable language in a few months. Cost: FREE!