A Border Collie With Nothing to Do
I've been off of the squash courts for just shy of a month now. I'm meeting up with Rob to do some light training for the first time in what feels like ever, so I anticipate some frustration due to seeing the skill I trained so hard this Winter to acquire slipping through my fingers.
Not playing squash has been very frustrating, as I really love the sport, and I do things because I want to improve. Being removed from that element means that I have to watch that improvement slip away and a heap of rust develop in place of the game I'm used to having at my disposal. It's especially hard because I trained very hard this Winter and Spring, and really felt like I'd reached a new level in my game. Oh well - all things come to pass, and it is the fool that doesn't listen to what their body is telling them.
In order to avoid going completely bucknuts-mental, I've been spending most of my time biking, working out, and dancing, in order to stay in shape and keep myself occupied (ever seen a border collie without anything to do? That's a pretty good analogy to the way I operate). Additionally, for the previous three weeks, I've had access to the dance studio whenever needed, which makes the act of practicing vastly superior to my other options.
About eight years ago, near the very start of my degree, I took it upon myself to practice dancing for thirty minutes everyday. Even before that, Graham and I would practice whenever the whim struck us. Lately, I've had more motivation than ever before to get down and actually put in some serious practice time, but as soon as I started, I noticed that my practices felt very unstructured. I would skim from technique to technique, getting distracted and never spending enough time on any one thing.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it's an indication that there are a lot of ideas that I have in my head that can legitimately evolve into dance moves and techniques. However, if I want to see and feel real improvement, it's important to be able to focus when I set out to practice. More for the sake of posterity than anything else, here is the practice routine that I came up with, along with a few notes describing why each part is there.
Routine vs Innovation
Before I go further, I think it's important to mention that routine and innovation are both important in any practice regimen. Innovation is an opportunity to let yourself do whatever your body and the music are telling you to do, and is where you're going to find the most creativity. Routine is where you will practice the fundamental movements that are core to the style of dance that you are pursuing (or even any activity in particular - scales for a piano player, for example). Routine provides you with a solid set of fundamentals upon which you are able to actually create and innovate. A good dancer needs to have a significant amount of both of these elements, so be sure not to neglect either of them when practicing.
Brainstorming
Before starting to plan out my routine, I wanted to do a braindump and get everything in my head out onto paper. There's no magic to this technique - you just sit down with a pencil and paper, and write. Don't question anything, just write. After you've sat there for three or four minutes without writing anything, you can be reasonably assured that you've gotten everything immediate down.
Note also that I wrote down Experiments. This is the placeholder for setting aside some time specifically to work on experimentation. Not practicing anything in particular, probably just ten minutes or so doing whatever. I may end up hating everything that I come up with in those ten minutes, but, on the other hand, I may discover a new type of movement that I hadn't considered before.
Practice Routine
The total amount of time I felt was reasonable for practicing was around ninety minutes. Anything more and I'm devoting more time than I have available. Anything less and I really don't give myself much time to innovate. When I first started practicing, I figured that it would be a stretch to get through forty-five minutes, however, once I actually force myself to overcome the inertia and actually get started, time seems to fly by pretty quickly.
So, what do I have planned?
So that's basically my practice routine for the summer. If I get tired of working on things in this manner, I can always mix it up and change. That is the power of my mind - look upon its works and despair!
I'm attending a popping workshop here in Victoria put on the Groovy Gs (of Vancouver) this coming Saturday. I'll definitely have some thoughts to post at that point, so check back soon.
I've been off of the squash courts for just shy of a month now. I'm meeting up with Rob to do some light training for the first time in what feels like ever, so I anticipate some frustration due to seeing the skill I trained so hard this Winter to acquire slipping through my fingers.
Not playing squash has been very frustrating, as I really love the sport, and I do things because I want to improve. Being removed from that element means that I have to watch that improvement slip away and a heap of rust develop in place of the game I'm used to having at my disposal. It's especially hard because I trained very hard this Winter and Spring, and really felt like I'd reached a new level in my game. Oh well - all things come to pass, and it is the fool that doesn't listen to what their body is telling them.
In order to avoid going completely bucknuts-mental, I've been spending most of my time biking, working out, and dancing, in order to stay in shape and keep myself occupied (ever seen a border collie without anything to do? That's a pretty good analogy to the way I operate). Additionally, for the previous three weeks, I've had access to the dance studio whenever needed, which makes the act of practicing vastly superior to my other options.
About eight years ago, near the very start of my degree, I took it upon myself to practice dancing for thirty minutes everyday. Even before that, Graham and I would practice whenever the whim struck us. Lately, I've had more motivation than ever before to get down and actually put in some serious practice time, but as soon as I started, I noticed that my practices felt very unstructured. I would skim from technique to technique, getting distracted and never spending enough time on any one thing.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it's an indication that there are a lot of ideas that I have in my head that can legitimately evolve into dance moves and techniques. However, if I want to see and feel real improvement, it's important to be able to focus when I set out to practice. More for the sake of posterity than anything else, here is the practice routine that I came up with, along with a few notes describing why each part is there.
Routine vs Innovation
Before I go further, I think it's important to mention that routine and innovation are both important in any practice regimen. Innovation is an opportunity to let yourself do whatever your body and the music are telling you to do, and is where you're going to find the most creativity. Routine is where you will practice the fundamental movements that are core to the style of dance that you are pursuing (or even any activity in particular - scales for a piano player, for example). Routine provides you with a solid set of fundamentals upon which you are able to actually create and innovate. A good dancer needs to have a significant amount of both of these elements, so be sure not to neglect either of them when practicing.
Brainstorming
Before starting to plan out my routine, I wanted to do a braindump and get everything in my head out onto paper. There's no magic to this technique - you just sit down with a pencil and paper, and write. Don't question anything, just write. After you've sat there for three or four minutes without writing anything, you can be reasonably assured that you've gotten everything immediate down.
- Waving
- Tutting
- Popping
- Fresno
- Choreography
- Glides
- Floats
- Flexes
- Foundations
- Experiments
Note also that I wrote down Experiments. This is the placeholder for setting aside some time specifically to work on experimentation. Not practicing anything in particular, probably just ten minutes or so doing whatever. I may end up hating everything that I come up with in those ten minutes, but, on the other hand, I may discover a new type of movement that I hadn't considered before.
Practice Routine
The total amount of time I felt was reasonable for practicing was around ninety minutes. Anything more and I'm devoting more time than I have available. Anything less and I really don't give myself much time to innovate. When I first started practicing, I figured that it would be a stretch to get through forty-five minutes, however, once I actually force myself to overcome the inertia and actually get started, time seems to fly by pretty quickly.
So, what do I have planned?
- Fresno and Variations (15 minutes)
This one is a natural starting place. The Fresno is the technique upon which everything else in popping builds, and is the starting point for the dance itself. Practicing the Fresno provides the opportunity to practice good isolation, good hits, getting funky, and being creative. No matter how good I get, I will always be able to practice the Fresno, come up with new variations and tightening it up.
Some specifics I want to practice are:
- Tight, crisp hits and isolations
- Walkouts
- Broken walks and hits into and out of the Fresno
- Transitions from the Fresno into other techniques (waves, tuts, etc.)
- Tutting (15 minutes)
Tutting is the newest technique I've worked on, and as such, there is a lot of room for me to improve. I need to practice not only transitions to and from various poses, but also just making the poses themselves clean and tight. Nothing looks worse than going into a box stance and having the box look more like a shitty oval. Don't settle for a shitty oval. Go for a nice clean box!
Specifics I need to work on:
- Tightening up poses
- New poses
- Transitions to and from various poses
- Footwork throughout
(I have learned most of my tutting so far without footwork, but you're not dancing if you're only moving half of your body - I need to work on this)
- Waves (15 minutes)
Waving is one of the trickier techniques for me, in terms of practice. I have a fairly good grasp of the fundamental concepts for good waves, and I've practiced arm and body waves quite a bit. However, I feel that I'm really letting myself down when it comes to actually being innovative with waving, and having a deeper understanding of the techniques.
For example, I know enough about waving to be able to use it when I'm freestyling, sending a wave up from my feet through my body and out my arms, but that's as far as it goes. I've never taken the time to sit down and practice sending waves in specific directions, or as specific transitions.
So, that's part of what I'm aiming to do here. Some specifics:
- Foundations (practice the individual isolations)
- Body wave (focus on isolating the hips)
- Waves through my legs and feet
- Waving into and out of various poses (eg, into King Tut pose), and transitions from waves to various other techniques
- Kick wave
- One-sided body waves (wave travels only down one side of the body)
- Variations on Phil Chbeeb's wave (view here at 34 seconds)
- Glides and Floats (15 minutes)
I've never really put enough time into learning to glide well. Part of that is because until recently, my practice sessions have been exclusively on carpet, arguably the worst surface to practice gliding on. They're also been inside, which means I can't practice with shoes on, which makes it that much harder (less support for the toes).
Gliding is a very frustrating and tedious technique to work on. Having the correct floor and footwear makes things a little easier. Specific things I intend to work on:Nothing much to elaborate on here. Gliding is the technique I'd like to see the most progression on - there's a lot of stuff I could be doing that I don't because I've never focused on this technique.
- Sideglide (specifically from left to right)
- Basic float (the foundation for most gliding)
- Snake glide
- Box glide (but work on side glide first)
- Forward glide
- Stationary glide
- Flexes (15 minutes)
Flexes are a technique that I never really learned properly the first time around. After Dillon covered them in one of our classes, it dawned on me how valuable it was to correctly learn these fundamental ways of segmenting and turning your body. A twist-o-flex may not look astonishing when done at normal speed, but the foundation can fit in with almost everything else that you do.
Specific flexes I want to work on:
- Standard twist-o-flex (with 4 pivots)
- Twist-o-flex with 5 pivots (add an additional head pivot in)
- Twist-o-flex shown here at 4:50 (thanks Guillaume!)
- Neck-o-flex
- Master-flex (I need knee pads to work on this one)
- Standard twist-o-flex, done backwards.
- Choreography (15 minutes)
Although choreography could technically fall as a sub-item into each of the above categories, I made a point of devoting at least 15 minutes in my routine purely to practicing this skill. If I don't, I end up spending all of my time working on fundamental movements. It's never a bad thing to have a really strong foundation (and there's ALWAYS things that I can find that need improving), but the only way to improve at choreography (and realistically, a complete dancer) is to spend some time working specifically on this skill.
One of the things that I've been working to appreciate is that choreography doesn't need to be something complicated. It can be as simple as putting together some Fresno movement, and then sending a wave through my arms, down one side of my body, up the other, and lastly, out my other arm. This isn't difficult choreography, but until I actually put it together and practice the sequence, it will never be as tight as it needs to be. And therein lies a small part of why choreography matters to me. Freestyling, to me, is the opportunity is to make use of anything that I have come up with in the past. Choreography is the opportunity to tread new ground. Once I've done that enough, it can become part of my freestyling repertoire, but not until.
Specific things I want to work on:
- Various routines from the Fresno
- Waving choreography
- Tutting choreography
- Some choreography including glides
- Some choreography including footwork for both tuts and waves
So that's basically my practice routine for the summer. If I get tired of working on things in this manner, I can always mix it up and change. That is the power of my mind - look upon its works and despair!
I'm attending a popping workshop here in Victoria put on the Groovy Gs (of Vancouver) this coming Saturday. I'll definitely have some thoughts to post at that point, so check back soon.
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