What to practice

When you are first starting out it is easy to figure out what to practice each week as you don’t have a lot to choose from. But, as you progress in the dance, you keep adding to your dance vocabulary and deciding what to focus on each time you set aside time to practice gets more difficult. This is where your dance notebook (see post from January 1) will come in handy, as it will remind you what all you have learned and help you create a practice schedule.

The first step for everyone is to set up a practice schedule. I recommend looking at your weekly calendar and figuring out when you can devote time to practice. It might be a half hour before work every day; it might be a three hour block on Saturday mornings. Figure out what works for your schedule and commit to dancing during that time, just like you commit to coming to class every week. And just like class, you may miss it upon occasion when something comes up, but you want to commit to practicing during that time as often as possible.

As a beginner in your second or third session, I suggest spending most of your practice time on what is being covered in the current session, but also devoting a portion of your practice time to the moves specific to the other session(s). For example if this session is on vertical circles, but you have already learned horizontal circle include 5 minutes of review of the horizontal circles in your warm up.

When you get to intermediate and advanced, you should warm up using the beginner level core movements (hip and ribcage slides and circles (all three types), pelvic tucks/drops, hip lifts/drops, hip twists, tummy pushes, chest arch/contract and chest lift/drop), then progress to a group improvisation review running through all the beginner moves and adding any intermediate and advanced level stall moves or combos that you have learned. Next work on practicing the movements specific to session you are currently taking.

The next part is a bit trickier. You need to figure out how often you need to review material so you don’t forget it, or at least so that you can figure out what it is from your notes. For some people that is going to be once every two weeks, others once every two months and I’m sure there are those who can go half a year and still be able to remember what was covered. Also, as you get more familiar with a given group of movements you can go longer between review sessions and still be able to remember what you are doing.

Once you have figured out how often you need to review material in order to not forget how something is done you can create a schedule for yourself. You can think of this as lesson plans for yourself. As an example, if you are an advanced student (or an intermediate student who has been through a couple of sessions) and if your frequency is once a month and you are practicing for three hours on Saturday mornings, you might designate the first Saturday of each month to review skirt, the second to review half circle veil, the third rectangular veil and the fourth cane. You can do the same thing with the dance steps covered in the sessions. Use your notebook where you’ve written down what you have learned to figure out all the moves you need to make time to review. You won’t have to review everything from the sessions before as some things are used so often you are probably seeing them every week in class, but it certainly never hurts to take a movement back to its most basic form and concentrate on how it is correctly executed.

If you are a current student and create a dance practice schedule and would like me to review it, just let me know. I would be happy to help you balance your practice time so that you are getting the most out of it.