How I practice

I broadly group my practices into three types:
1. General.
2. Performance.
3. Play.

1: I think it's very very important to practice what you know. Especially in dance forms like ATS/ITS, if you don't use it, you lose it. For a while I had a list of every move my troupe did, and I'd run through all of them. I also had them on flashcards so I could randomly select a few and practice transitioning between them.

Also in "General" is practicing the smallest pieces of what we do. Explore the range of movement you have, and drill that range over and over until it expands. A teacher I sometimes work with suggested doing top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top undulations over and over. She also suggested doing them in every direction-- to the front, front-right, straight right, and so on. Lemme tell you, that sort of movement (although I don't really use it on stage) works muscles I didn't know I had.

Varying what you practice is important. Work different muscle groups. Work your brain. Keep yourself sharp.

2: If you have a performance coming up, practice what you'll be performing. Practice it like you're on stage. Don't stop and go back if you eff up. You won't have that option on stage, so don't give it to yourself in practice (or, at least, not always. If you're really confused, stop and fix the issue and then move on). Practice in your costume, including any jewelry or hair pieces you're wearing. You'll learn, in advance, that your bracelet snags your veil or your headpiece falls off when you lean backward (this latter issue was my most recent "Aw, crap"). If you have to wear shoes at the venue, practice in them. If you play zils, practice with them. Don't cut corners. Especially don't cut corners if you're being paid. They are not paying you to half-ass.

3: Even if dancing (or teaching dance) is your job, you started because it was fun, right? Geez, I hope so. It needs to remain fun. Even when there's hard work, endless drills, aching muscles, there needs to be play. Experimentation leads to discovery. I really didn't believe this for a long time. I just drilled and drilled and drilled. It wasn't until I decided to step away from "pure" ATS that I felt the freedom to experiment. I make up my own combos. I choreograph songs. Both come from letting myself play with music that I love. Sometimes I have to "watch myself" when I experiment-- if I'm choreographing a piece, I'll free dance and see what I come up with. If I like what I did, I write it down and try it again. Sometimes I get so caught up in the moment that I forget what I did. So I record myself, usually doing the same song a few times in a row to see what I repeat (and to give myself a chance to forget the camera is there). It's still play.
When you play, don't restrict yourself. Don't worry that your dancing isn't precise enough, or that you're not using "real moves." Just dance, damnit. Turn the pressure cooker off for a while. Stop thinking. Just move around until you forget there's any other option.

An overuse of italics.

Sometimes things don't work out.

You can practice your steps, run through your choreography a million times, test out that costume, triple check your music, plan for every possible eventuality, and BAM! Something goes wrong. Call it Murphy's Law, or call it what I do: Life. Yep. That's how life is. You think you know what's going on, but that's an illusion you feed yourself so you don't go loco. We have no idea what is going to happen. We can only plan for the worst and hope for the best.

I often find that the more stress I put on myself to "do good," the less good I actually do. My troupe calls it "chasing the awesome." The more awesome you try to be, the less awesome you tend to ACTUALLY be. This doesn't mean you should stop practicing, or planning, or thinking, but it does mean that you need to find the line between "trying" and "trying too hard" and then go up to the line, but no further.

Now, if you've effed up-- I mean really effed up-- you can feel free to examine why/how/when that happened. Let's say you have a wardrobe malfunction on stage. Did you practice the piece in the costume? Did you make sure it was constructed well before putting it on? Did you check the venue to see if the costume was appropriate for it (i.e., "Gee, I really wish I hadn't worn that white chiffon to the rainy day of Ren Faire")?

If you figure out where you effed up, make a note of what you did and how to avoid it, and move the fuck on. Seriously. Holding onto that "Oh damnit, I messed up" feeling does nothing to help you. Don't use it as an excuse to stop trying ("I'm just not good enough") or to work yourself to death ("I'll practice until I can't possibly mess up."). Accept the fact that you're human, that everyone knows you're human, that mistakes show you're not a television show, and get over it.

Have you ever preplanned a conversation that you're afraid to have? Where you try and guess what will be said, and come up with answers to it in advance. So you're "prepared." So you're less afraid.

Did it help? I mean, really help? I have found that just as often as not, I cannot predict what someone will do or say. I think they'll get mad and they don't. Or I figure it'll be fine and it's not. All my planning does, usually, is give me a false sense of security. It's like a screensaver for my brain.

Worrying does nothing. It does not cure sickness, or prevent accidents, or keep your CD from skipping during the number right in front of the famous dancer. All it does is raise your heart rate and use up time that you could be spending on, I dunno, something productive and/or fun.

Sometimes things don't work out. And that's okay.

Sometimes I need to be in the right mood....

....and that mood is last-minute panic.

I have a performance tomorrow, and am nervous. I thought this was a good thing to talk about.

My first solo was at a retirement home. I was down in Madison visiting some family and one of them asked if I would dance where she worked. At the time, I was eyeball deep in ATS, so that was my vocabulary. I was going to be dancing to music I'd never heard before (a band that played some crazy Caribbean drums), and I didn't have my costume along. I should have been more nervous, given the circumstance, but I wasn't. The only thing that bothered me was being suddenly center stage and not knowing anyone. Once I was going, though, I loved it. I wasn't afraid. I was able to think about what I was doing (like, "Oh, there are people behind me. So I'll split this move into two parts and use it to turn around and face the back for a while.") and I didn't freak out, even when the smoke from the campfire got into my eyes and a dropped my basket (which I caught).

I realized I really did like solos. It was kinda sacrilege at the time. I was an ATS dancer. We didn't just run off and do solos all the time. And I hadn't been "raised" (if drag queens have drag mamas, surely dancers have dance mamas) to dance to modern music. BUT I REALLY WANTED TO.

So my second solo was at an annual Halloween event. I could get away with a lot, it being themed and Halloween at that, so I threw everything I could at it. I dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein and danced to "Remains of the Day" from the Corpse Bride. People liked it. I was cute and silly. But I also felt like it wasn't *real* dancing. Theme pieces are so reliant on the theme that it's easy to cheat. Theoretically, you still should be dancing as well as you possibly can, but when the number is silly, or cute, well.... it's easy to let things get too silly and cute, to let the attitude and theme carry the piece. So though my number was liked at the show, I wasn't extremely pleased with it.

After the Haflaween, I was sorta put off solos. I had this strong feeling that I was cheating. I was mostly using ATS moves, trying to scrape the noticeable ATS off them, and setting them in a specific order as a choreography. It was really boring, at least to my eye and body. I wasn't stretching myself.

So my troupe kept doing shows and I kept doing solos. A few of them were within bigger shows, where we needed 3 minutes to fill and everyone else had already danced a lot and needed a break. A few were at haflas. None of them made me terribly nervous. I figured the more solos I did, the less nervous I would get. That's sorta true. Not completely, though.

I tried to add things to my vocabulary-- not just moves, but concepts. I had to break down the ATS first (and this is a topic all to itself) and then let other things trickle in. Drill, drill, drill, until my brain would let the new moves have a place in my body.

At one hafla, one of my students literally pushed me up to the music matron and said, "She's soloing!" But it was a push in the way that friends will push you to have a drink when you've had a really long day. I really wanted to do the solo. I'd danced to the song a million times. It was the venue making me nervous. Not only was there a mix of dancers I knew and dancers I didn't, but there was also a few non-dancer friends there, and they were all really close to the "stage," and ohgeezthey'reallygonnaseehowterribleIreallyam.

Performances in front of the public don't bother me. I do the very best I can, and realize that many of the viewers have not seen enough bellydance to know the bad from the okay and the good from the great. It's a dangerous and stupid thing to rely on, but at the same time I always have the thought of "Well, I'm a bellydancer. I'm magical to start with. Everything else is gravy."

So there's this show in the spring. I'm on a real stage, with real lighting, dancing in a real (piece-specific) costume to a real song and real choreography. There are real people AND real dancers in the audience.
I was on top of the world. I loved it, even though I forgot half the choreo and just sorta shimmy-walked around the stage. I'm still not happy with it-- or at least, not with most of it-- but I was glad that I finally had done a solo that wasn't just thrown together. I'd chosen the song last minute, true (because I was originally set to do a fan veil piece, but one of my fans broke), but it was a song that had been in my "oh, if I only had the nerve" pile for over a year. My personality showed more despite it being a themed piece.

That show was a few months ago. My students decided that they'd like to throw a "dirty song" hafla-- one for those songs that you really WANT to dance to, but just aren't appropriate for most venues. I liked that idea. So BLEEP Fest was born. I will talk more about this idea some other time. My students had some songs they wanted to do, all on their own, so I decided to go with a solo, just because the opportunity was too fun to let pass.

Hafla is tomorrow. I'm actually not as nervous as I thought I'd be. I've gone over the (very simple) choreography many many times. I need to practice it in my costume, and make sure I have my music, and do all the little things that will make me crazy if I don't figure them out in advance. Do my hair once. Do my makeup once. Take the mess my creative brain will devise and untangle it.

Overall, I'm not freaking out. I don't think it's because I'm "prepared." I've been prepared before. I've been so prepared as to be over-prepared. But this round, I'm lowering my expectations of myself. I don't need to be the most amazing dancer ever. I just need to be myself, do the best I can, and if I fuck up, let people see that I'm vulnerable. I personally love it when a high-octane instructor effs up and LETS YOU SEE. Tempest did this on her new DVD-- she left the bloopers in. She was teaching her own moves and still made mistakes, and let us all see that, Hey, She Does That Too, and nobody died. (Not that we know. Tempest is one bad ass dancer. There could be bodies in her backyard.) I get to show that I have a sense of humor, and even though I'm not the most amazingly technical dancer yet, I still have my own style, and every time I indulge in it, the stronger it gets and the easier it is to convey.

No neat ending to this piece. Just the littlest kiddo yelling about macaroni and cheese. See y'all tomorrow and hopefully nobody falls down.