Tonight at Dance Discovery, Missy referred to having worked out the dance she was teaching with her stuffed animals. I thought that was a hoot!
Bob tells me that he was dancing with Becky Hill when someone called a dance she wrote. She said she had never danced it before, and that it sure seemed different from when she was doing it with salt and pepper shakers.
How do people work out dances before they have dancers to play with? Those online animated diagrams are cute, but do you find them hard to follow? I do.
Sue said she walks every person's part through. That sounds workable, though requiring lots of extra brain cells.
Have any of you heard of, or do you use, any other methods?
M
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One when I couldn't figure some dance figure, I used checkers. It's hard to make them all move at the same time though, but they end up in the right spot at the end. I think I might have even used one color for ladies and the other for gents. It does give sort of a birds eye view.
I've been wondering how you teach a dance you have never danced before. Perhaps a preliminary question would be what attracted you to the dance to begin with that made you want to learn it and try to teach it? The music? The Prince Rupert's March we did last night had a great tune, but the dance itself was only so-so. How much can you tell about a dance from a verbal explanation even if it includes diagrams? I like Sue's idea of walking through all the parts. For me, the physical act of dancing helps me to understand how the dance works.
Like Sue, I walk every part myself. Dancing with ghosts isn't really too easy, but (amazingly!) I find I can actually do it. Some figures, obviously, are harder to visualize (embody?) than others.
In the case of English country dance, I can only dance it effectively if I know the tune and "sing" it in my head and count at the same time. Contra works for me with just counting.
I tried using salt shakers but in order to get them to the proper places I ended up having to visualize all the parts anyhow, and it was easier to walk it than to try to make the pieces move the way they were supposed to. That seemed hopelessly confusing.
Oh--and those little animated diagrams? I've tried to use some of the ones for square dance figures, to learn how some particular call works. Can't do it. It seems that the way I'm wired requires moving. My body always understands what's going on when my brain clearly doesn't.
When I was trying to work out Roll in the Hey, which is ridiculously easy until the wow finish, I started drawing various states of the couples, and ended up with twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each
one was to be used for.
It sort of helped.
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