I don’t feel like practicing today

All those hours of practice got us to where we are right now. We are hard-pressed to relax and have a day of doing nothing. What are we missing out on? Everyone else is working on something while we are just sitting here!

What is ‘productive enough’? Am I self-disciplined enough? These things race through my mind on the regular. Guess what? It’s okay to shut it down for a day. For a week. For a month.

Here are a few gems that I always remind myself of.

Ruby Keeler retired from show business and came back 30 years later to star in the Broadway revival of “No, No, Nanette”. Glenda Jackson took a 30-year hiatus from the stage to go fight Thatcherism as a member of Parliament in Great Britain, returning to Broadway at age 81. Alessandra Ferri reprised her role as Juliet with American Ballet Theatre at age 53 (!) after retiring 9 years prior.

So you aren’t feeling it today, or tomorrow. Intuition isn’t just random guessing. Trust it. It will bring you back to practicing when you are ready.

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Artists Careers

Popularity contest

One highly rewarding thing about being an artist is having a group of true fans that will always show up for you. It doesn’t mean you are popular, and being popular doesn’t always mean you are good.

The gold, the best stuff, the reason to keep going is the people who care about what you have to give. I take time to design my tap classes each week, and I take pride in the work I put into them. My classes weren’t packed in New York City, and less people signed up to perform my choreography in the showcases than the other choreographers on the bill. To me that made it more special. The dancers that were with me believed in my vision.

Popular does not equal best, and you don’t need everybody to love you. You need a consistent group of people that show up and believe in your ideas and your work.

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Training for success

Train smart

Where you train and who you attribute your training to is not cut and dry. It never was, not even when we were living in an analog world. Taking from as many teachers as you can isn’t training, no matter how well-known they are. Hopping from studio to studio isn’t training well either.

Most importantly, every dancer needs their anchor, the teachers that shape them with a foundation that will serve them wherever they go.

The key is finding the perfect mix. First, there are the go-to’s, the mentors that really know you and know how to pull out your best, and aren’t afraid of offending you if they push harder. They may be a different set of teachers over the years, but you always need them. Second, there are those teachers that you love to take from once in a while, and it’s always a treat when you do. Lastly, push yourself to take classes from completely new people. This one gets harder the older you get. And don’t stop taking class, even if it means giving yourself a class and imagining what your mentor is saying to you with each movement.

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Careers

Best-laid plans

Most of the time we are not good at planning our lives. We think that if we do this, that will happen, and we are fraught with worry about making the right decisions. Much of the time we are wrong, and then we keep doing it. It’s an unproductive feedback loop.

I wasn’t planning to be a dancer. I was going to be an engineer! Dancing was something I obsessively did, training as much as possible. The universe said, “nope.” I’m going to take you this way. And like that little feather in Forrest Gump, I went.

I once signed a yearlong contract to work in Dubai and was fired after 2 days of training and sent back to New York. The universe thought I didn’t really need to spend a year there. Next up, corporate America. Meh. As much as I tried to plan for another future, that wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing. “Dance”, she said.

The universe puts us where we need to be. I’m not sure where she’ll send me next, but I’ll keep dancing, educating and sharing my work, ready to be that little feather when the moment comes.

Categories
online learning Training for success

What is ‘better’?

With the great challenges the human race faces right now, there is also an opportunity, a chance to take the extra time and/or increasing online resources to keep exploring what ‘better’ means to us, in terms of our craft, and how to get there.

Working toward your version of better might not be taking advantage of 100 different free online classes. It might be finding one person to learn from that you may not have had access to before. It may be studying footage and teaching yourself choreography, whether from a Janet Jackson video or a Balanchine variation, or signing up for that Master Class membership that you’ve been wanting to do for years.

What ‘better’ means to others might be different. Taking 5 classes in a day with an online convention might not float your boat. Maybe investing in training with one mentor is more your cup of tea. Sometimes we get overtaken by our old fried paradox of choice, where there are so many options to choose from that we freeze and do nothing.

No matter what, do something. Keep moving. Find your ‘better’.

Connecting for the long game

Being charismatic in a room with large group of colleagues that I don’t really know does not come naturally. Hanging out by the cheese and fruit plates does.

In my earlier career, I could show up to rehearsals with a strong ethic and great attitude, work hard and go home. That was enough. That’s what I was great at. Having strength in cultivating relationships with colleagues and customers came later.

Staying actively engaged with people and genuinely interested in what they have to say, whether in person or on the myriad of social networks, gains the trust of those that care about your work. Even with the people that you don’t think like you. Don’t dismiss them. Engage with them too.

It is scary to share more with the world than our art (vulnerability, eek!), especially for the ambiverts and introverts. Opportunity comes when we dance with that fear.

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Technology

Keep the change

When the industry changes, it’s easy to feel stressed. The purist inside needs to meet the innovator somewhere in the middle. It’s easy to shut down when there is so much noise coming into your feed. Instagram live classes! Zoom classes! Downloadable classes!

Are you doing enough? Are you doing it the right way? Should you charge? Are other people doing it better?

Those who stick their feet in the mud and don’t budge may still be around when we emerge from this unprecedented crisis. They need to ask themselves, though, why they aren’t budging. If it’s rooted in panic, I challenge them to dig in and open their minds.

It took a beat to figure out how I wanted to share my work in this new reality. The important thing is to keep moving, imperfection and all, and to do it in a way that is true to you. I’m sharing my work like this over here, and dancers that want to work like this will come over here.

It’s more productive to embrace change than to shun it and shut down. All we have is right now and all we can do is our best work.

Categories
Training for success

Jack of many trades

It’s eye-opening to read articles having to explain why dancers should study tap dancing, or why hip hop dancers should take ballet. Dance is dance, and it’s important to learn it all and not to question why, or ‘what will I need this for’? I will sit in this chair and pretend to chew food to weird, dissonant music, and I won’t ask ‘why’. This is what the choreographer said to do. (That actually happened!)

It is disheartening to teach a class of students that are there because they are required to be. They have to take tap to be in the company. They have to take 2 ballet classes a week to compete. This just doesn’t make sense to me. YOU GUYS! It’s DANCE! We are dancing! Afro-Cuban, Graham technique, waacking, butoh. I am in.

Jack-of-all-trades, master of none is not an accurate pairing, especially now. In the formative years, it’s so important to take in everything. Absorb it all. Be a master of many. It is truly possible. Robert A. Heinlein, considered the dean of science fiction writing, said “Specialization is for insects.” The versatile ones run the show. Steve Jobs was not the best programmer at Apple. He had a broad range of skills and could predict and innovate.

It’s possible to be a jack of many trades and pick one or two to pursue being an expert in. You can do both at the same time. The most important reason? It’s way more fun.

Categories
Dance and Social Media

If a dancer pliés in their kitchen…

Dance training is personal. It will always mean more to the individual dancer than it will to anyone else. The emotional release, the increased vigor that you feel as you train harder, the feeling of doing something better than you did yesterday. All of that belongs to you. Nobody can feel what you feel inside your body and soul as you train to become better.

This has been true forever, before we had to stay at home and before we became globally hyperconnected.

Copying MTV videos with my friend in her driveway was for her and me. I didn’t need anyone else to see it. I had fun and I felt good and that’s all that mattered. (Yes, MTV used to play music videos!)

Now we get to the metaphysics. If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Philosophers and scientists are divided. On the scientific side, “Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of our ear…If there are no ears to hear, there will be no sound.” (1) On the philosophical side, the tree will make a sound, even if nobody heard it, because it could have been heard. (2)

Each dancer has something inside that is theirs, that nobody can take. Training is a personal journey. If a dancer pliés in their kitchen and nobody is around to see it, it doesn’t matter. It belongs to them.

Sources: (1) – Scientific American, (2) Wikipedia/George Berkely

Categories
Choreography

Great idea!

So you have this idea for a piece. It’s a great idea. You’ve got the perfect music and you see it unfolding in your mind.

You’ve got these students to set your work on. Maybe everything falls into place and you bring your idea to vivid life. Brilliant.

Or they may be too young to tackle the maturity level of your idea. Possibly you have a hard time pulling any authentic expression out of them. They may not be able to execute technical elements to satisfy what’s needed to embody your idea.

This can be one of the great challenges of being a dance educator. I’ve made this mistake. It’s not enough to pick a song or concept I love and create what I want because it moves me.

It’s all about pushing dancers to explore more layers of self-expression and discovery, while giving them something they can genuinely relate to. You find that perfect spot in the middle, where dancers bring something different to the stage with each season while still getting to be themselves.