Strategies for Remembering Choreography - Making it Stick

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

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Julie Diana

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.

Click on this link to read more:  http://www.dancespirit.com/your-body/mind/making-stick/

Video auditions for summer intensives

Many senior dancers take the opportunity to travel and train at different studios across Canada and the U.S. during the summer.  This allows students to explore different styles and different teachers, be more independent (perhaps spending several weeks away from home for the first time), and learn more about opportunities for dance outside Edmonton for when it is time for them to move on.

For many schools, their summer intensive is by audition only.  Occasionally it is possible to audition in the city if the school you want to audition for has an audition tour that comes here.  However, if you had a conflict and couldn't attend their audition, or they aren't auditioning in Edmonton, you may have to find a different way to tryout.  You could travel to another city, perhaps, or you could send in a video. 

Janet Hagisavas, senior teacher and director of the teacher training program at ESB and Vimy Dance has found this great article about how to create a better audition video.

Originally posted on the Dance Teacher online magazine, it has many pieces of advice to help you when creating an audition video.  Remember, many teachers on staff at ESB and Vimy Dance have had experience with this and would love to help you - you just need to ask!

10 Minutes to Impress

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Ashley Rivers

 

A summer intensive director sits bleary-eyed in front of a monitor for the fourth hour straight, viewing videos of one eager applicant after another. A few submissions naturally rise to the top, while most fade into the parade. “When you watch 100 videos a year, you get pretty smart about what you’re looking for,” says Shelly Power, director of Houston Ballet’s Ben Stevenson Academy.
To help ensure that your students’ videos stand out, DT asked for advice from Power, The Juilliard School, Patrick Armand of San Francisco Ballet School and Oregon-based dance teacher and videographer Les Watanabe.

To read more, go to Dance Teacher Magazine by clicking here.
 

To Clean or Not to Clean….

Nancy Hamilton, senior teacher for Vimy Dance and Co-Director of the Edmonton Festival Ballet has written this great piece regarding the preparation of choreography for performance.  

  

To Clean or Not to Clean….

It is with a certain amount of trepidation that I announce a few months into each year, “It is time to start cleaning this piece.”  This announcement is usually followed by a few groans, sighs or a stunned silence in the studio if I am working with the younger dancers.  The senior dancers know what a necessary evil this is, and while the younger dancers are unsure, this announcement certainly does not sound like something that will be fun. The cleaning process in any piece is essential however, and onstage it is what separates the good from the bad and the ugly.  

Preparing any dance piece for stage involves a series of steps; learning choreography, cleaning, repetition, and polish. 

First, dancers must learn the work and memorize the steps.  This step gets easier with more experience and training, and takes less and less time as dancers advance in level. Unlike technique classes, rehearsals run with the assumption that the dancer already knows how to do the steps, and now is responsible for learning them in new sequences and patterns.   

Once the choreography is learned, a series of cleaning rehearsals will pull the dance apart count by count and establish where the head, eye line, arms, legs, feet etc. are for everyone on stage.   

Once these motor patterns are established correctly, (through guided practice of the movement) the dancers are ready to move forward to repetition. The mistake often made in preparing a piece for stage comes from reversing the second and third step of this series, and doing too much repetition without cleaning first.  In my experience, clean dances do not evolve from just running a dance over and over.  The pitfall in that approach is that each dancer may be practicing bad habits and technique, and committing those flawed motor patterns to memory.  This will inevitably lead to performance without true unity and cohesiveness.   

Repetition following a series of cleaning rehearsals will be most beneficial to the piece as the dancers will have the correct steps and techniques committed to muscle memory, and will be able to go on stage without conscious thought of the choreography and better able to focus on performance.

Once the piece is set, cleaned and rehearsed repeatedly, the final steps are taken to polish the piece with small adjustments to spacing, performance and quality of movement.  If the cleaning process is skipped, or done too late, the foundation of the piece will never be as strong and the final step of polishing would be, in the words of my husband Steve, “like putting lipstick on a pig.”  It will not cover the fact that the dancers are not together.  

So get ready ladies and gentlemen, it’s a New Year and it’s time to clean!

~ Nancy Hamilton

Why Is Dancing So Good for Your Brain?

Again, thank you Miss Dixie for finding this fantastic article about the benefits of dance on brain function!  As the article by Christopher Bergland from The Athlete's Way points out in his article posted on the Psychology Today website - "Dancers maximize cognitive function and muscle memory through practice."  Click here to read more about 'Why Dancing is so Good for Your Brain." 

The Ultimate Rehab Program for Dancers

Thank you Miss Dixie for finding this great article with a video to help deal with rehabilitation from injury!  We, as dancers, struggle occasionally with injuries.  It is very important to address injury right away and treat it appropriately.  Doctors and physiotherapists are very important to the process of diagnosis and prognosis.  It is very important that dancers are given exercises to work on from their rehabilitation practitioner - ones that focus on building strength and avoiding re-injury in the future.  Also, clear guidelines on what activity can still be done - how classes can be modified for the dancers are very important.

This article and video focuses on foot injuries, but can also be taken beyond that to apply to other injuries as well.  Thank you Miss Dixie!  Click here to see more about 'The Ultimate Rehab Program for Dancers'

10 Things Your Dance Teacher Does

This article is from the 'Dancers Market' out of Australia.  Miss Sylvia offered this point of view as one you might find interesting!  Click here to read more about "10 Things Your Dance Teacher Does" 

Their blog has many other interesting and fun articles as well!

Stretching Advice from the Rockettes' Blog

Thank you Miss Lindsay for finding this informative and interesting article about stretching!  It has fantastic advice!!!


https://www.rockettes.com/blog/stretching-tips-for-dancers/#prclt-Ii3ZU71d