Below are some questions (along with my answers) asked by Francesa in preparation for our upcoming 1:1 dance private scheduled this Friday. Also included a couple of my favorite dance clips that inspire me.

• What are 3 house steps that you are comfortable with and use frequently?
  • Pas de bourree
  • Loose Leg / Chase
  • Cross Step
  • Shuffle
• ⁠What are 3 house steps that you struggle with or tend to avoid?
  • Farmer
  • Skate
  • Train
  • Sidewalk, Salsa (and others that I’ve practiced that sometimes don’t make appearances during rounds/sessions etc)
• Can you identify what in particular you struggle with for those steps?
  • Falling off beat (exclusively with the farmer)
  • Not quite aesthetically where I want it to be (Skate / Train)
  • Inability (or have not yet attempted really) to convey different rhythms beyond the foundational, syncopated rhythmic pattern
  • Develop a groove (where I doing more dancing than steps) that I can dance and intertwine these steps with
  • Often forget that I’ve even trained these steps and thus rarely come out
• ⁠Who are 3 house dancers who inspire you or whose style you enjoy?

  So difficult to name just three so going to toss out a few more at the risk of violating the constraint in the question 😊
  • Brian Green
  • Kwame
  • Yugson
  • Rick Indigo
  • Shan S
  • J Soul Zuberi
  • Rachad
• ⁠Can you identify what is about those dancers that you appreciate?
  • One common theme is the beautiful simplicity in their movements
  • Ability to dance both masculine and feminine energy
  • Laid back while also energetic and crisp and clear
  • Versatility and their ability to adapt to different types of (house) music
  • While the steps are “beautiful”, the ability to gracefully move other parts of the torso
• Is there anything in particular you’re really keen to get out of this initial session?
  • Curious to hear your observations from the past 3 weeks of Kev’s Kitchen
  • Incorporating double time without looking or feeling so robotic
  • Turns and space without looking robotic / stiff in the torso
  • From the wide array of “elements” (e.g. levels, space, rhythm, musical, isolation, footwork) how to manage training routine and practice and develop them over both the short and long term

Very rarely, even after 2 years of dancing house, do I throw in footwork heavy dance moves like heel toe or farmer. However, I’ve recently been motivated for forward for several reasons:

1. About 2.5 weeks ago, I learned how to (finally) farmer on beat – historically I’ve been so focused on how the move looks and the overly focused on the aesthetic of the move. However, during my dance lesson with Chiara (MASH), she demystified the movement by providing me a different target, which was the rhythm of the move.
2. Identified what specifically I’ve disliked about the aesthetic of my heel toe – often I’ll re-watch my videos and struggle to pinpoint what it is specifically that I don’t like about the aesthetic of the heel toe movement. But while watching a series of YouTube tutorials, I recognized that it’s not my hip movement, it’s not the jack: it’s the (lack of) dorsiflexion in the base foot. Up until now, despite having both the flexibility and mobility, I have not been loading base foot. When I do deliberately shift my weight and dorsiflex, the consequence of that the opposite leg (the one performing heel toe) extends further away from the body, making it more obvious that I am actually performing a heel toe movement. Secondarily, I’m now feeling the burn in my thighs. So much of dance, I believe, is body mind connection and awareness.

The heel toe practice was inspired by watching the following YouTube tutorial

What I like about the above YouTube tutorial is the way he constructs the drills. It’s a reminder to:

1. Start at a slower tempo
2. Start with doing the move 8 counts, followed by 4 counts, followed 2 counts
3. Practice looping the movement over and over and over again and see how many loops you can do without making an error

One thing missing from the above video that I decided to inject into my practice is after drilling the heel toe movement, try and connect it with other moves I am familiar with. As you can see in the first video above, I transition in and out of heel toe and the farmer. While it’s great to practice the move in isolation (which has its purpose for refining the movement), it’s easy for me to forget why I am drilling which is of course: to dance.

Who attended?

Elena, Aubrey, Jimmy, Alex

What went well?

I really liked this exercise I came up with, where each person chooses a rhythm in their own mind, danced their rhythm, then ever other person in the group attempts to guess their rhythm. This was fun, challenging, and engaging. Perhaps next time increase difficulty by adding music?

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What did I learn?

The warm up exercise — where we each take turns in taking a single foundation and adding a variation — seems to cause all of us to drop out of sync. And I don’t think this has to do with the (lack of) technical skills of people in the group because from my perspective, everyone is seasoned (even more experienced than me).

That the prompt of “continuous flow” seems to significantly shift my dance in a positive direction during my rounds. This reminder tends to be given by Elena, who was there the first time Jake had prompted me and we all witnessed a radical change in my movement during my cypher round.

Feedback

• Elena asked if we could integrate the upper body and lower body (instead of two separate circuits) workouts

Some action items

• Upgrade the rhythm software to toggle or disable the metronome
• Upgrade the rhythm software to do 8 counts, where two different 4 counts combined
• Want to have more self exploration time
• Think about doing repetitions instead of only time – multiple folks tend to like to hit the target. On one hand, yes, give the people what they want. And second, curious if folks can continue challenging themselves. Perhaps we can have both?

These days, I’m learning how to work with this vessel, my body. I’m constantly weighing the balance between acceptance and change and generally speaking, I sometimes tend to over-index on changing myself (in spirit of growth). In spirit of leveraging the way I am wired, I’m practicing leveraging my analytical mind in the context of dance. Often, we’re told as dancers to “shut off the mind” because thinking too much during dance can in fact impede your ability to move. This is true in many contexts and situations.

But how can I honor the part of my brain that is analytical? This has been on my mind lately especially after my 1:1 dance lesson with Jevan, who nonchalantly said “What if [having an analytical mind] can be your superpower [in dance]?”

Identifying rhythmic challenges during dance class

One of the many benefits of attending dance class is that they can sometimes reveal and help you become aware of weaknesses, or opportunities for growth. And last week, during Jevan’s class that I attend ritually, I noticed that I was struggling just a tad with identifying rhythmic patterns that were a bit more complex than the typical “1 and 2 and 3 and 4”. For instance, when he shouted (something along the lines of) “4 and 2 3”. At the same time, I struggled to clap the rhythm while dancing at the same time.

Writing a software program to practice identifying rhythmic patterns

Following the class, the next morning, I had the thought to do some ear training (similar to how when I took singing and guitar lessons for years, I’d practice singing major and minor scales) by writing my own little piece of software.

The command line program essentially generates a random rhythm and repeatedly plays the rhythm with kick drums and high hats. I for now initially constrained the program to only play 8 notes — 1 bars where each note is an eighth note — which means there’s a total of 256 rhythmic patterns. This constraint seems sufficient (for now) to train my ears since doubling the number of bars — from 1 to 2 bars, a total of 16 notes — would increase the total number of rhythmic patterns to 65,536.

Implementation details

I define an 8-bit map and then generate all the possible computations. Then during each invocation, a random rhythmic pattern is chosen. For each bit in the bit-map, if the bit is flipped, a sound will be played. The type of sound depends. If the bit’s position sits either any of the whole notes (i.e. “1 2 3 4”), then a kick drum sound plays. In contrast, if the bit’s position is on any of the “and” (

Anyways, for 8 counts, there’s a 8-bit map, each bit representing an 8th note. if a bit — possible value is zero or one — is set (i.e: one), then a sound will be played. On the 1 2 3 4, sound of a kick drum. On any of the “and” a high hat.

1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0

This rhythm, converts to words, equates to:

“ONE … TWO and … and FOUR”

Of course this is ear training but I am incorporating this into my practice. It’s a tool. It’s not meant to replace listening to music. But I am finding that being able to identify the rhythm with the program seems to improve my ability to identify rhythmic patterns of certain instruments in real music tracks.

One other addition I made to the program. Since it can be challenging to identify when the bar starts — since I initially only played a kick drum and high hat — the program always play a metronome sound, a “click”, on the one. Eventually, I made relax this and remove it.

This morning, I re-watched a video that I recorded the night before, while practicing dancing some house dance. And what stood out to me the most was not my footwork, but my arms. In particular, something seemed “off” about the positioning of my fingers as well as the angle in my arms. Given arms is not a topic frequently covered in house dance, I decided to draw inspiration from ballet and contemporary to see what those styles teach because I’m sure there is some theory behind placing the arms in such a way that is aesthetically pleasing.

So the main take away from watching a series of YouTube videos this morning is that:

• Arms are always at a diagonal (even when you think they are straight)
• Engage the shoulders
• In ballet, elbows should be raised above wrist

From Pole Dancing

• Generate the movement from the shoulder blade, initiating from the back

Contemporary

Arms

• Arms out to the side is not actually a straight line
• Arms protruding slight in front of you
• Similar concept with arms up, you want to keep the shoulder position natural and therefore keep arms out slightly in front

Legs

While watching the video on arms, the YouTube recommendation engine suggested a video on theory of legs which I found just as interesting

• When extending leg out in front, lead with the knee
• Avoid tilting the pelvis
• Squeeze muscles of thighs and inner thighs and glutes so you are pulling / dragging the leg instead of just picking them up and plopping them

Jazz Arms

• When extending arms up and out, a good cue is that you should be able to see your fingers in your periphery

Ballet

• A couple different analogies and metaphors including squeezing your hand through a glove
• Shaking your hand vigorously and then in the last moment, however your hand lands, that’s how it should look
• Mind is blown right now in her statement “if you have tension in your hands it means you aren’t using your shoulder blade muscles enough”