Choreography 101

Here it is, pretty simple really: VARIETY. And yet it’s amazing how many people don’t follow this really basic rule of choreography (or writing if you’re writing, or acting a play, or playing music, etc, etc, etc). Simply one of the first things you should do is show a lot of variety.

If you’re doing a formation routine don’t just show me everyone all moving in the same layout across the floor back and forth. You bore me! Show different shapes on the floor, show me lines of people, show me circles, show me intersecting lines, be a sculptor of people on the floor. Make the shapes created in different ways: people all get there at once, people get there one by one, or they come together from two different groups. Be creative about it, have fun with it!

Your audience will create story

It doesn’t have to be all that thought out, it doesn’t have to be smart. It just needs to show variety. Humans have a natural tendency to seek out meaning and will create story in their own minds to try to match whatever you do, even when you’re not even trying to show a story. Sometimes it’s better just to have a random sequence of a whole bunch of different wild strange unrelated movement.

Be methodical

Lists are wonderful for this. You can find tons of lists of all sorts of aspects or parts of dancing. Use it. Be methodical about it. A list of all the ballroom dance positions? Fantastic, make a routine that shows all of them. (That’s a great exercise I had to do for a class once.) A list of the Laban dynamics (wringing, pressing, floating, gliding, slashing, thrusting, dabbing, flicking). Again, fantastic! Layer that on top of your routine of different dance positions. (Also a fantastic exercise I’ve had to do for coaches and I’ve used for training students).

Find lists. Make your own lists. Treasure them. Dance positions, dynamics, partner Interactions, shapes of the body, shapes of movement on the floor, shapes of groups, timings of groups, rhythmical patterns. Get a great book like “Modern Educational Dance” by Valorie-Preston Dunlop which has tons of great lists from Laban.

Great creativity can come from just being methodical.

Show people everything you know

Know all the steps in the syllabus? Great, show me. Know the Laban dynamics, great, show me. Know different types of rumba walks, great, show me. Know different types of turns. Show me ALL of them. Know some acting? Awesome, show me different emotions. Layer as many things as you can on what you do. Make your dancing RICH. Show me all that you’ve learned and all the effort you’ve put into learning dance. Make it look like it costs a million dollars.

Don’t be afraid to incorporate other things you’ve learned. You know modern dance, ballet, african, acting, yoga, pilates, music, whatever. Incorporate the variety you have learned from those into your dancing. Create your own style that is uniquely you.

Refine style later

Start with the variety. If in the end your purpose is to create a certain mood then cut and trim and manipulate after you have the base variety. To create or show a certain mood, to truly show it, you must show the opposite. You can’t show speed without slow – otherwise it is just frantic. You can’t show happiness or sadness without it’s opposite.

This is fundamental to all art

Writing. What kinds of sentences are there? Passive, Active, Interrogative, Imperative, etc. Show them all to me. What types of phrases are there? What kinds of constructs are there? Show them all to me.

Acting. What kinds of feelings are there? What are different reactions to them? What are physical actions that people do?

Shame, Embarrassment, Resilience, Teaching Dance

How do you feel about your dancing? If you’re a dance teacher, what is the attitude and feeling in your lessons? If you’re a student what’s the attitude and feeling in the lessons you take?

It’s a learning environment. Students (and teachers) are learning to do something differently that what they were doing before. You’re going to do things wrong, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to learn different things to do, you’re going to do things that might be difficult to do. But should you feel embarrassed when you do? Should you feel ashamed when you do? Probably you will at some point.

For some people it will be more extreme for some it will be less. Some teachers will try to over protect their students and some will be just the opposite. Both extremes can be bad for the students if it continues. The best teachers will switch, and soothe when it’s needed and just be direct (which at times can seem kind of harsh) when they need to. Over time we can get to a point of more resilience for the students and more compassion for the teacher (and more compassion for ourselves).

Being direct and honest is a lot different than specifically trying to shame or embarrass someone. If people are specifically trying to shame or embarrass you, don’t just walk, run!!! If you get trapped into the situation of being embarrassed about what you do dance-wise you won’t feel like expressing yourself. And we want more unique individual people out there, not more robots! (the robot apocalypse is already here and it’s us!)

The Steps

Too often the syllabus is taught as a strict set of rules. But it not really. It’s just a guide about levels and order of teaching the steps. “The Technique of Ballroom Dancing” is not the technique of dancing – it’s the technique of teaching dancing. It won’t teach you to express or move more efficiently or move more gracefully. Teaching the syllabus is not teaching how to dance. It’s not teaching dance. It’s just teaching steps.

Vulnerability

Don’t get overly soft. Don’t baby your students, don’t seek out teachers that are overly nice (don’t seek out ones that are overly harsh either). That feeling of vulnerability in learning dance is important. Standing in front of an audience with that kind of vulnerability takes courage.

The teaching cycle of doing things “right” and working to get better. Or even just thinking that there is a “right” way of doing things creates this cycle of shame and avoidance. Dancers become more disconnected from their audience from themselves and their emotions.

When dancers can get out on the floor and show vulnerability, relax their bodies and let their own natural emotions out they can get the best presence on the floor. It can be magnetic, magic, and incredible. When dancers try to do the “right” thing, force their actions and close themselves off, they come of unauthentic, unfriendly.

When people come to see you dance no one ever comes to see people dance “right” or how correct they can do something. People want to see the extra-ordinary not the ordinary. Take chances, express your feelings, take risks, be unique! Do the steps your way.

It’s Really About Community

People sometimes forget that it’s all about community. Why do people take a dance class? or are part of a group? or part of a dance company? or take lessons? or work a certain job? Is it for the technique? or the teacher? or for the money? or for many other very superficial reasons? For the most part, it’s actually about the community. Community fulfills a basic human need for connection (a health need – sometimes “need” has a bad connotation).

Community is a good thing. Through creating community we create friends, people that can help each other out. The ability to work together as a group to accomplish things that otherwise would not be able to be accomplished alone. Group classes are a form of community – a group of people who all pool their money together to afford lessons. They can also support and encourage each other.

How do you create community? How do you improve the health of a community? How do you grow a community? What things get in the way of a community growing? What things drive people away from the community?

Criticalness

If people come into your community to evaluate it, to see if they “fit-in”, to see if it is right for them, if they feel they are accepted, what will they be looking for? If someone who is new to dance and comes to a social dance and they get met with someone who is not going to just dance with them and have fun and play, but bombards them with criticisms and telling them what they are doing is wrong, how are they going to take that? Are they going to feel accepted into the group?

Maybe perhaps more dancers would be more prudent to take a break from the judgemental attitude and just have fun for a bit. (Maybe it would be healthy for their own dancing as well to allow themselves to be more forgiving of their own dancing. Grow a dancer, not a robot!)

Negativity and Gossip

This can be a double edged sword. In a way you can bond with someone by complaining about a common problem or person, you create a common enemy. Or maybe you are playing some sales line that your teacher told you to say, “well, you don’t want to learn wrong do you?” in some hopes to discredit some other teacher. In the end, these things fail.

Many people see through this. They think, “this group is petty and mean, why should I join them? There are a hundred other groups I could join that don’t have this kind of negativity.” And they run away from that social group or community – rightfully so!

Small Group Thinking

In an interesting study social scientists put mice in different sized colonies and observed their behavior. Something interesting happens when a colony gets bigger than 150. The group gets big enough that not every member has to work hard and contribute to the group – some become noticeably mentally unhealthy.

How would you behave in a small group? Like growing up in a small town? What if you knew everyone would eventually hear exactly the gossip you spoke? (That kind of happens even in large groups!) There’s good reason why most of the religious rules and politeness rules exist and are common across the entire world.

Create and Grow

How can you grow your community? It’s actually pretty simple – people want community in the first place. It’s mostly just being careful not to kill its growth. So go out, be friendly. Ask people questions and learn about them. Make them accepted for who they are and ok for them to feel like they can be themselves. Don’t tell them right away that you hate pink dresses (especially if they’re wearing one at the moment). What’s more valuable to you in the long run? A person’s friendship and support, or if they don’t wear pink dresses?

Everyone hits plateaus

It happens to everyone at some point, they hit a plateau in their progress. If you haven’t, then either you’re not pushing yourself enough or you just haven’t realized that you’re in the middle of one. Once you’re in one, how do you get out of it? And perhaps more importantly, how do you feel about being in one?

Are you progressing things in your life? Your work, your relationships, your dancing, your fitness? Whatever things you might have in your life…

Recognizing the plateau

Most people actually know already when they’re in a plateau. You must listen to yourself and your feelings. Most people do feel when they get in a plateau about life, but they don’t realize that is what they are feeling. They get angry, frustrated, difficult, bored, disconnected, melancholy, unresponsive, depressed.

Sometimes people ignore these obvious signs of the plateau. It could be because they are distracted by things in their life. More often though people actually use the things in their life as a distraction to avoid the fact that they’re sitting in a plateau.

Sometimes the distraction is external – ever have the dance teacher that told you that you are just in a plateau and your just need to work hard and you will get past it? What if that never happens? I’ve seen plenty of people stick with teachers for ages in a stuck state, just spinning their wheels, working super hard and not progressing.

Getting out of the plateau

As one writer put it, “Ten years of the same one year of experience does not make for ten years of experience.” So it’s important to move out of the plateau and continue to progress.

The primary reason people plateau is simple. It’s lack of knowledge. It’s not knowing how to progress.

The trap of the pretty good

In dance, and in fitness (even business and relationships) there is a lot of misinformation. A lot of mixed benefit things – things that partially work or work pretty good. Plenty of things, techniques that work pretty well or good enough – good enough for people to use them and get results for a few months, but then those methods stop being effective. Even after the methods have stopped working to get progress people continue to use them – boom – plateau reached.

Keep learning

It’s pretty simple really, to get out of the plateau you must learn new things, new methods, new practices, new exercises. You must try new things. Even if they fail (usually a quick tell) it will only have taken a short time instead of the vast time people usually keep trying to do the same thing again and again.

It’s best really to get information from things that are different from what you do but similar. Want to progress your dancing? study yoga, weight lifting, other types of dance, music, gymnastics, martial arts, theater, etc.

Read, take coaching (a good coach shows you the things you are missing more so that just teaches you), watch videos, go to theater, or just simply experiment.

Shoulder Placement

It’s rare to find people with nice shoulder placement in their bodies in modern society now a days. Most pro ballroom competitors have it, many pro ballet have it, and many modern dancers have it. The average amateur or person on the street does not.

Good shoulder placement allows for a stronger and more confident look on the floor. It allows for easier movement of the arms allowing them to move quicker, easier, and more expressively. And for ballroom allows for much better connection with your partner – less noise and stronger, clearer leads/follows.

Bone Placement / Alignment

For many years early in my dancing I looked at different people with different body types and thought of it as just that. They had different body types, and there was nothing to do about it. But as I’ve learned over the years, it’s not really so static. There is a lot of change to the body and how it holds itself.

Any single bone in the body has multiple muscles pulling on it in different directions. If those muscles are misbalanced in their work and one is tight and it’s opposing muscle is weak the bone eventually gets placed in a location that is “easy” feeling but not efficient for the body to work. The joints around then function with less range of motion and weaker. Over longer periods of time the connective tissue itself can change to adapt to the new position.

There are lots of bones / joints in the body that effect our over all look and function, and it might be easy to look at them and think, “oh it’s just the way someone is shaped.” And it is the way someone is shaped, but with proper muscle training the joints and bones can be moved to a more pleasing or attractive look for the entire body.

Things to observe in people… The natural direction of turn-out in their feet. The shape of their foot – are their toes curved inward (the big toe very common, and sometimes the pinky toe). The shape of the curve of the back (is it a natural S? and note it’s relationship to the intercostal angle – the angle made by the bottom of the breast bone and the two bottoms of the rib cage in front – is that angle a nice 90 degree angle?). The straightness of the legs – bow-legged-ness or knocked-knee-ness. The shape of the spine on the back – is the spinal bones bare to the world or do they sit in a nice valley. Any unusual bumps in the spine.

Many of these things are all just the way we hold our bodies. And they can all be cleaned up and realigned with some simple training. Is it that all the top dancers have a certain body type and that you need a certain body type to be a great dancer? Well, yes, in a way, but it’s not that it’s given to them, most of them have earned it with lots of physical work, whether they were conscience about the muscle training or not, their bodies went through it.

The Shoulder Blade

The shoulder blade should really slide nicely flat against the back of the body. No protruding sides or edges. The shoulder blade itself really isn’t connected to the body with joints. It kind of free-floats, like a weight floating in space and it floats in space by being pulled in all different directions at the same time by different muscles. if the muscles are mis-balanced in strength or just improperly trained then the shoulder blade ends up in the wrong position. Often with many people these days, pulled inward toward the spine and pulled up – which totally restricts the movement of the upper spine and blocks some of the free movement of the arm because the rib cage blocks it in front.

Different muscles pull the shoulder blade in different directions. The trapezius muscles pull the shoulders inward and up. The romboid muscles pull them in toward the spine. The latissimus dorsi (the “lat” muscle) pulls toward the spine and can pull up, just toward the spine or most importantly downward. The serratus muscle connects on the inside edge of the shoulder blade and wraps around the rib cage and can pull the shoulder blade out – away from the spine.

The serratus muscles and the lat muscles are probably the ones weakest in most people and need the most development on average. They will bring the shoulder blades down and out and flatten them against the back for most people. When balanced out it will give someone this nice trapezoidal shape to their upper body (it’ll make you look thinner!). People who did gymnastics or swimming in high school often have this nice shape already because those muscles trained.

When the shoulder blade is properly placed and the muscles around are strengthened the shoulder becomes more stabilized and connected to the core of the body. Force from the center can more effectively be distributed to the arms.

The Scapulo-humeral Joint

The scapulo-humeral joint – the shoulder socket, once the shoulder blade is more stabilized, the scapulo-humeral joint can then be worked to be looser and more mobile. Often this joint is over worked and actually limited in range of motion because it is over worked because the shoulder blade is not stabilized.

If we can stabilize the shoulder blade and allow for freer movement at the scapulo-humeral joint then we get nicer arm positions in ballet, and nicer, easier, and thus quicker movement for all our dancing.

Weight Lifting

By far this is one of the fastest ways I’ve seen to train people to get the shoulder blades into proper position. Significant progress can be made in a simple 3 work out a week (for about 1/2 hour) for 6 to 8 weeks that will have a long lasting effect.

Basic work-out: 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps of horizontal push and pull and vertical push and pull. Horizontal pull: rowing actions, rowing machines, etc – works the romboids and the middle range of the lat muscle. Horizontal push: a bench press, push-ups – works the pulling of the shoulders forward with the pectorals in the front and the serratus. Vertical pull: a pull-up, lat pull down machines – works the lat muscle pulling down. Vertical push: a military press, shoulder shrugs – works the trapezius.

Focus on technique: get aware of the muscles you want to train – it does no good to go on the lat pull down machine and use your biceps and triceps to pull with. Focus on the larger muscles around the shoulder blade first. Then in time work to balance effort along the entire chain of muscles of the arm – all the way from the spine to the hand.

Ballet

Ballet class or any other formal training type of dance, if the teacher is knowledgeable, can be a great way to get the proper placement and movement in the arms. I find this usually takes longer to get to the right placement of the shoulder blade (often 2 to 3 years of class 2 to 3 times a week) (but keep in mind you’re learning lots of other really good stuff at the same time too).

Being Sold

Do you think that your teacher is “the one”? Has he (or she) convinced you to only take lessons from them? That they have the only RIGHT way to teach dance? Ballroom dancing in America (more so than Europe) has a long history of being part of the hard sell. To the point where it is even considered on the same level as used car salesman.

Now I know you’re thinking, I’m not gullible. I’m not easily manipulated. Social psychology professor Robert Cialdini has done a lot of research into this topic (and has a great book: The Psychology of Influence). Part of his research involved being a used car salesman, a door to door encyclopedia salesman, a waiter, and yes, even a ballroom dance instructor. (His book is required reading for most Marketing majors.)

So, what do you think… out of someone who has a strong will, someone who has an average will and someone who is weak willed, which one of them is most manipulatable? Most people say it’s the weak willed one. But the actual studies point to the fact that it’s the average person that is more manipulatable. (Partially because they think they’re not vulnerable.)

Things people fall for

Or perhaps “things I’ve fallen for”

Or perhaps “things you can use to get more students”

Teachers with a heavy sense of “Right” and “Wrong”. Some teachers will fill their lessons with “always do this” and “never do that” and “this is right” and “that is wrong”. The simple advice is this: don’t walk away from those teachers, RUN! That style of teaching fulfills a certain sense of security people are looking for. In a way it’s feeding on people’s insecurity. In the long run, there really aren’t any absolutes in dancing. It is art, it is about learning rules and then breaking rules. It’s about creating style, not boring robots. It’s not about learning right and wrong – that’s a waste of time! It’s about doing the work – training the body to physically move well – it takes time and physical effort, muscle building and learning muscle coordination. Classic sales line: “Oh you should take lessons from teacher ABC, because you don’t want to learn it wrong do you?”. Bonus points for wording questions with negatives or double negatives because that’s been found to be more effective manipulation.

Emphasizing style over technique. Classic Sales line: “Oh don’t take from teacher ABC, because they competed in (American Style/ International Style/ Smooth/ Ryhthm/ Standard/ Latin) and not (insert whatever style you want to sell here)”. People use this all the time in the ballroom world. I fell for this a couple times and avoided taking lessons from some really awesome teachers that really knew their stuff. The underlying technique of good movement is the same across just about everything. You might as well take lessons in ballet or modern or african or hip-hop. I often encourage my students to diversify. Do you really think that just one teacher has cornered the secret on understanding dance? I mean, really? Who do you think they learned from? Or how do you think they developed a unique style themselves without studying from multiple different sources?

Teachers that over compliment. Again, it’s feeding into something the student is looking for. (Acceptance? Acknowledgement? Desire?).

Teachers that over criticize. Some students will think, “Oh how wonderful, I have something to shoot for, I have work to do, I have a challenge.” This is a spot were a strong idea of work ethic can get you into trouble. Like I said earlier, It’s about the work. It’s about understanding the muscle development, the exercises to get there. It can actually be done very plainly and simply. Need to criticize? Not really. Need for guidance, yes definitely. Over criticalness can actually lead to worse performance, a lack of expressiveness, and a lack of play. All things that we really want more of in dancing.

Core Training: Getting Aware of the Transverse

Sure people talk about training the core, and dance teachers talk about moving from the center, but what does that really mean? And what do you really do to train for it? And why train for it in the first place?

I often use this analogy with my students. Imagine you’re in the middle of a pool of water, if you push directly out, you have nothing to push against. You end up just moving water around and not going anywhere. If you’re at the edge of the pool, the wall is there, it’s solid, it’s not going anywhere. If you push against the wall you can send your self drifting off in to the water pretty far. Your core is like your natural internal wall for your body, if it’s toned, the rest of your body can work off against it. Your arms can push stronger from a strong center. Your legs can push out as well, allowing you to move with more stability, speed, and strength.

Without a strong core our centers are like jell-o. If you push out with the arms or legs to move half of that force just goes into counter-acting inefficient wiggly noise absorbed by the rest of your body. It can also cause lots of sheering type forces in the other joints in the body which just lead to injury. A strong core not only gives us more efficient movement, it prevents injury. (In fact, I’d say good movement and unhealthy injury prone movement are really opposite ends of one continuum – what you need to learn to get better movement – whether it’s dance or sport or yoga or whatever, is the same as what you need to learn to prevent injury).

The search for understanding

At one point I just got annoyed with some of the teachers out there. Many would talk about using your core, or moving from your center, but none of them would give any description of what that really was! One instructor was just like, “Got belly?”. That just wasn’t good enough for me. I had to seek out more information, I needed to find somebody who knew more about what was really going on. Dance people had a lot of the training ideas and exercises but lacked actual understanding (and thus lack consistency in the success of the training), yoga people also had some knowledge, had better understanding but again lacked enough understanding. It was with fitness people that I finally found the answers to the questions about core and center that I was looking for. (Check out the work of Paul Chek among many others.)

Transverse Abdominis

The transverse abdominis (or TVA) is a large surface of muscle that wraps around the sides of the body through the belly region. If you’re standing it’s fibers line up parallel with the ground and pull the front of the body around the sides to the spine in the back like a built in corset. It has the action of pulling the belly button in toward the spine. Cough. (Go ahead take a moment and cough, I’ll wait for you. That action is also a contraction of the TVA).

Contracting the TVA as an explicit exercise is taught in many movement types, you’ve probably already experienced already and just didn’t know it was the TVA that you were activating or supposed to activate. Ballet teacher telling you to “zip up”? Pilates teacher tell you to pull your belly button to your spine? Sports teacher tell you to pull your belly in like you’re about to get punched? Martha Graham style contraction? Belly Dancing actions… yoga breathing…  the list goes on and on…

The TVA pulls on connective tissue surrounding the lumbar region of the spine (the low back). Not only creating protection for the low spine but also creating a center – a place for the rest of the body to work off of. Not only does this connective tissue wrap the spine but also wraps the lats (latissimus dorsi) going upward in the body to effect the arms, but also the iliopsoas muscles going downward in the body to effect the legs, and also the erector spine to effect the rest of the spine going upward. This wrapping effect around the muscles can even act as a multiplier effect on the efficiency of those muscles by squeezing them tighter.

Simple Exercise

Lie on the floor face down. Lift your belly button up off the floor, and hold if for as long as you can. Don’t cheat the exercise: when first doing this, it’s easy to cheat by lifting your belly button up by pushing into the floor with your legs or arms or shoulders or something else. Try to relax your limbs. Only lift your belly button by using the TVA (cough again just to get the feel for it). Can’t hold it very long? That’s ok, relax, and try again. Do 10 repetitions. Try to get to being able to hold it for 2 minutes straight. (Paul Chek says that’s just for good healthy movement in everyday life, if you’re a professional dancer, go for more!)

You don’t have to do the exercise everyday, 3 times a week is pretty good. Do it at the end of a workout instead of the beginning – if the core is weak from being tired, you’re more likely to injure yourself during normal exercise.

Integration

Ok, got awareness of your TVA? Got it stronger? Start integrating it into other movements you do. Could be anything. In advanced athletes the TVA is measured to activate several milliseconds before any other muscle activates in any action they do. Going to take a step across the floor? Contract the TVA before you push off your leg. Going to lift your arm? Contract the TVA before you do it. Going to make a connection with a dance partner (as lead or as follow or as just general partnering)? Contract your TVA before you connect. Even just going to lift your Starbucks coffee up to your mouth? Contract your TVA! :)