Our goal for the 2025 dance year is to find ways to help you tap into your individual artistry. You might be wondering, what does that mean? Let me explain. It is the ability to use the tools, techniques, and methods we share with you in each class to effectively to bring your creative choices to you execution of any given choreography.
As instructors, choreographers, and performers, we recognize that there is a huge difference between executing choreography and using every move to express how you are feeling.
What do I mean?
An artist creates to make you feel. So as you are absorbing the material or finding your comfortability with what you are learning, find ways to connect deeper simultaneously. Find ways to inspire your inner child and your inner voice to say something meaningful with the 30 to 50 seconds you are connected to the music your are dancing to.
I must address the elephant in the room though. It is hard to do that when you are trying to learn the exact move. That is where the problem lies. If you obsess over the idea of perfectly executing a phrase or the choreography taught in class, then it is going to stifle your ability to tap into your artistry.
Being perfect puts you in a box that only forces you to focus on getting it right or being right. In an open class, there is nothing wrong with that, but if you truly want to grow, understand that you have to let go of that mindset and connect to something unfamiliar.
If you are trying to be perfect with every move then you are missing the beauty of art and dance. We are all meant to be unique and different. We all move different and different things inspire different emotions. We employ you to feel and be the light to your unknown. Move with he confidence that paves the way for your soul to recognize its own beauty ever in the dark.
We have been groomed from the moment we started interacting with each other that if something is different, it is frowned upon. In our classes, we want to see you perspective how ever you wish to illustrate it. We create choreography to guide you down the runway but you have to figure out how to fly.
How do you do this?
Our brain and body has been groomed to learn first through extreme concentration, master the material being taught to you, and then figure out how to creatively bring how you are feeling to life. The way how class is designed if we just keep adding new choreography on top of what you are learning, then it is harder to keep track of where you are mentally or store all the moves in your head. What we are asking you to do this year is to feel first, and we know this goes entirely against everything you’ve been taught. However, the most efficient way to store visuals and multiple phrases is the game of association or tell a story. If you make every move personal to you in an intentional physical way but also associate it with a gesture or a feeling you can attach it to, you have already started your experimentation of artistry that will help you to remember what your doing with intentional fluidity rather than pauses, hiccups, and over analyzation of specific moves.
Why am I sharing this?
As a dancer that started with free styling, the moments I feel most free is taking liberties within my movement that is a reflection to how I am feeling and how I want the world to experience my joy. It took me to years to learn that I can use that same approach to learning choreography. If I dance with the intention to learn the choreography details instead of learning the choreography so I can dance, then taking a dance class is more fulfilling to me. Why? Because I am making it my movement immediately than trying to learn how to move exactly like the instructor.
How long will this take to learn?
Like anything behavior or in this case a subconscious method of learning, it takes multiple experiences with built in mental reminders to dance and make creative choices immediately even if you feel uncomfortable or the phrase of moves are not yet synced to your body. Reroute your mind in this process. Focus on the rhythms or the how’s in which the instructor’s relays the movement. Take the sounds, lyrics, and interpretation of musicality make them yours. Let your body sing them with joy, anger, confidence, intention, aggression, love, resentment, sadness, happiness, and triumph. That is were your artistry lives. That is the place where we don’t visit often enough when we dance. That is where the beauty of who you are creatively lives. Remind yourself to visit there first in 2025, especially when cyborg of subconscious learning hinges on being perfect. Take as many moments to tap into your artistry and we promise you will be the beneficiary of richer, more fulfilling class experiences. ,