Swing Dynamite Blog

Thoughts and news about swing dancing in Ottawa

Swing Choreography and the Tibetan Sand Mandala

[ 1 Comment ] Posted by on Nov 23, 2011 in Getting Good at Swing Dancing, Teaching Dance

Some swing dancers love routines, some hate them. Since I started off in the “not a fan” dept. and moved on to choreograph more numbers, routines, sequences and so on than I can remember, let me explain the value of choreography for people whose only goal is pure social dancing.

Swing dancing is an improvised, social activity, a collaborative art form created in the moment. And when I first started taking swing lessons I couldn’t understand why teachers kept insisting on doing mini-routines. After all, my goal wasn’t to memorize a choreography, it was learning to lead the moves. Let’s face it, when classes use routines, there’s often as much back-leading as there is following. So why do it?

There are a few reasons:

  1. Spotting errors. If everyone’s doing the same thing, teachers can spot obvious errors like major footwork problems or timing issues immediately, even in a very large class. Good teachers can also spot when dancers are backleading in order to make it work.
  2. Transitions. If you’re just learning to dance, often the transitions between moves are the hardest to lead and to follow. By doing a sequence, we ensure that everyone knows how to go from move to move. This is important for the leaders, who sometimes freak out and need about 137 basics in a row before they’re willing to try the new move, because having a sequence gives them a chance to get quicker transitions into muscle memory. But it’s just as important for followers, who need to get their bodies ready after one challenging move to do the next.
  3. Memory. When students leave the class, the mini-routine helps ensure they remember the moves when they try to practice them at home–or out dancing.
  4. Repetition. By doing the same moves over and over again in a sequence, you engrave them into muscle memory, which means that instead of worrying about what’s next, you can relax and think about doing them better.

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Great Dance Teachers Need to Struggle

[ No Comments ] Posted by 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” »

Teaching Advanced Dancers

[ No Comments ] Posted by on Jun 04, 2010 in General, Swing Dancing, Teaching Dance

We’re at an exciting place with swing dancing in Ottawa: the rise of the advanced dancers.

When we first started Swing Dynamite in 2006, the advanced dancer was a rare breed. Most dancers were beginners. If you could do a decent swingout you were pretty good!

The challenge in teaching dancers at that beginner/intermediate level is like the old metaphor of holding a bird in your hand: to grasp firmly enough to keep it from flying away, but gently enough that you don’t crush it. Similarly, what most dancers need is a balance between giving them the technique they need in order to move and connect better, and the freedom to play, create and simply have fun.

Things change with advanced dancers. At some point dancers need a new kind of guidance. You have to let the bird fly away. And very few teachers understand this. Even the top teachers in the world often tend to focus on getting everyone to dance the way they do, when what the advanced dancers really need is to discover their own style.

That’s where we’ve gotten with many of Ottawa’s dancers now: they’re good enough that I have to be cautious about coaching them, because they’re in that zone where it’s not all about “good vs. bad” anymore: now it’s about their evolving personal style. So I have to focus a lot on differentiating between “poor technique/expression/creative choices” and “not going far enough in their own direction.”

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