Tuesdays have become my training days. 4pm-6pm, my own organized Tuesday Training session. Following that, 7pm-9pm at Kev’s Kitchen. And though today is today, I am sitting out due to a hamstring injury (more about the injury over at Stretch Therapy Forum)
Because I’m nursing this injury tonight, I decided to try and spend a few cycles re-watching my own dance rounds from last week in spirit of improving my ability to self-analyze and provide self critique.
Why review my own rounds?
Although I continue to train and practice, I think it can be helpful to sometimes pause and check in and reflect. I admit, I sometimes have a tendency to focus only on areas of growth while ignoring — an unintentional self invalidation — some of my progress. But I digress.
Because I am relatively early in my dance journey — about 2.5 years in — I’ve relied on classes, mentors, teachers, instructors etc to help guide me. While I will continue leaning on this different paths, I also want to increase my own ability to (lack of a better word) judge where I am at, identify where I fall short, and then construct a plan to train and practice.
Rinse and repeat.
So, for now, I am going to leverage what I learned from the book Think Breaking and analyze my own rounds and also analyze some other dancer’s rounds that I inspired me. My thought is that if I pinpoint some quality in their dance I like and then if I notice it’s absent from my own, then I’m on the right path of improving self-analysis.
And while there are many facets of the dance to analyze, I’m going to (in spirit of time) focus on on Dynamics. Again, there are many other parts of the dance I can dive into but because I’m new to evaluating my dance using this framework, I want to first familiarize myself with the terminology and semantics etc.
Kev’s Kitchen
Round 1
My intention of this round was to incorporate the exercises we had been drilling for the hour leading up to the cypher, the drill focused on stepping flat footed with full force, as well as stepping on the ball of the foot.
Towards the end of my round, I attempted to change the rhythmic pattern and increase from “on time” (i.e. every quarter note) to “double time” (i.e. every eighth note) but eventually fell off beat — definitely a stretch for me. When I took this experimental leap, Kev said “too much too much” and that’s to be expected. A little embarrassing on my part but I don’t shy away from doing “too much” because, even as Kev said, it’s easier to go “too much” and pull back.
(Body) Physical
Dynamics
- Contrasts – although I vary the speed/velocity of the step, there’s a lack of contrast in terms of energy; similarly, unlike Gabby’s round (see below) there’s not this consistent contraction and expansion like quality, going from slow to fast, smooth to sharp, small to large
Round 2
TBD
Rounds that inspired me
Gabby’s Round 1
Dynamics
- Contrast – she starts off smooth with her steps and then after a few counts, transitions to sharper, staccato like movements. Similarly, when she extends her limbs, she often changes from short distances to long distances. Yet another form of contrast: she’ll sometimes contract and dance smaller and then explode and expand.
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