Jayme Kurach, teacher at Vimy Dance and Co-director of the Edmonton Contemporary Dancers wrote this and found an article that she thought might help out all of our dancers!
After
a long, lazy break my classes suffered from not being able to remember their
dances. I thought offering some strategies, outside of relying on
technology (such as videotaping with our phones or cameras), for the dancers for remembering
choreography would be almost too relevant. I think the key to this
article is that everyone learns differently and will require different
strategies to remember choreography. Also, an important note is that these strategies will
need to be practiced ... For as long as I can remember, Tina (Jayme is referring to our director Tina Covlin-Dewart) always took the
time out of my solo rehearsal to have me write it down in my own words. Between
this rehearsal and the next, using my notes, any obvious musical cues that may
have been identified and the small amount of muscle memory I may have attained
from rehearsal, I was able to piece the choreography back together. And by next
solo rehearsal we could continue with new choreography, and then, the entire process
repeated itself.
~ Jayme Kurach
Please check out the following article from the online magazine - Dance Spirit.
Making It Stick
Joffrey Ballet dancer Jeraldine Mendoza was thrilled to be cast as Juliet in Krzysztof Pastor’s Romeo and Juliet—but her excitement dimmed after the first few rehearsals. She had trouble wrapping her head around the complex choreography, especially since its vocabulary was more contemporary than classical. “They were teaching it so quickly that I couldn’t pick it up,” she says. “I freaked out!”Learning and retaining choreography is one of a dancer’s greatest challenges. How can you improve your choreographic memory? DS (Dance Spirit) talked to the pros about their strategies—and about why absorbing choreography is so difficult in the first place.
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