Notes taken from Bill Borgida's Teacher Training workshop.
Date: September 8 & 9, 2007
Author: Dave Jarvis
Bring people closer in large rooms. When people are far away from the instructors there can be a tendency to start talking together.
By moving people closer to the teachers, it becomes less socially acceptable to speak over someone who is talking near by. That is, a close gathering of people reduces their tendency for discourse.
When attention wanes after explaining a move, count in a firm voice: 5, 6 ... 5, 6, 7, 8!
Focus people back to the task at hand and obtain their attention without having to tell them to be quiet.
Ways Follows can challenge themselves include:
Ways Leads can challenge Follows include:
When Follows do not carry their motion forward on 3 & 4 of a Swing Out, compensate by creating distance.
When people dance with good Follows and Leads, their attraction to dance increases, and so does their likelihood on becoming part of the scene. It can be considered inappropriate to ask people to dance with beginners. Rather, some ideas to help out beginners include:
The general public knows little about the differences in Swing dance flavours.
The difference between eight-count Lindy Hop and six-count East Coast is not going to be readily understood. So call everything Swing until the students are ready for the differences.
Avoid using the simple East Coast Swing as bait, only to switch to Lindy Hop when the students arrive. Instead, use East Coast as the hook.
While debates and experiences on teaching eight-count Lindy Hop vs. East Coast Swing rage on, here are some aspects of six-count East Coast Swing that make it a worthy stepping-stone for beginners:
Consider teaching moves that are an easy transition into Lindy Hop. For example, inside and outside turns in six-counts.
Listening to someone lecture about how to dance can quickly become boring. To make matters worse, not everybody learns by hearing. Students can zone out, not care, or even not understand.
At the bginning of the lesson, have students shake their body in wild, wreckless abandon.
Reduce the students' tension, have fun, limber them up, and make them aware of their body. It also grabs their attention, and wakes them from their residual daily doldrums.
Continue the lesson with a simple version of the Big Apple. Have the students form a circle; the teacher is part of that circle. Emphasize that perfection is not the point: trying is.
Continue the fun and excitement, and keep the attention focused, while inclusively demonstrating core movement and technique. There is no need to tell students what to do at this point. Silient mimicry gets them involved, active and having fun immediately. (Imagine instructing people who cannot understand English.)
Each move performed for the students to copy should be:
The simplified Big Apple should introduce basic technique. This can be done by highlighting good moves vs. bad moves, non-verbally. A show of a smile vs. a frown, thumbs-up vs. thumbs-down, and nodding the head vs. shaking the head can be just as effective as words. To music:
Instead of talking and demonstrating, have students practice while instructing.
Have students do the moves and techniques as often (and soon) as possible.
While it is tempting to share the depth and flavour of partner dancing (especially Lindy Hop), too much information about its nature and complexities can be overwhelming for beginners. Consider a short demonstration at the end of a lesson instead.
Words have no intrinsic meaning until the context for those words has been defined (or illustrated, or both). Further, words are often the cause of misunderstanding. Avoid using words (e.g., step, center, tension, compression) that must be defined before they can be understood.
Beginners have little knowledge about concepts that dancers have come to understand. The vocabulary dancers used to describe ideas with each other can be quite incomprehensible to people new to the scene. Further, words can be overloaded with preconceptions. For example, use pulse instead of bounce, as the word bounce can be interpreted to mean hop, skip, or jump.
Be picky about vocabulary as people often take words very literally.
Avoid talking about dance in terms of rules or guidelines.
It is more valuable (both as a student and as a teacher) to understand the reasons behind movement than to understand the words that describe the movement.
To help understand the reasons behind movement, have students experience the difference between movement that feels good in dance, and movement that could feel better.
By experiencing the reasons behind movement, the idea is more likely to stick with the student. Also, by knowing the fundamentals of movement, those same fundamentals can be thought of as a general case, which can then be applied to a variety of specific instances. Some experiments to try with students include:
By experiencing the reasons behind movement, it becomes possible to treat the causes of the problems.
Discuss movement in terms of hips, rather than steps and feet placement.
Feet move as a consequence of moving the hips and torso. Using hips is also what gives Swing its sway. In North America, many people are not immediately comfortable with putting a little sway into their hips. Drawing focus there should help overcome this slight discomfort.
Talk in terms of balance and poise, rather than steps and feet placement.
Like with hips, discussion of movement in terms of balance and poise will naturally lead to proper placement of feet. This avoids having to refer to the feet. Further, the word "step" can be dropped in favour of the word "shift". That is, instead of saying "step to the left" you can now say, "shift your weight to the left."
Weight transferring is one of the most important aspects of dance.
From proper weight transfer, the following aspects of dance start to shine:
Start in Closed Position when beginning a new dance with your partner.
Give people time to feel each other's pulse, to feel the music, and establish comfort. This is a time to connect with your partner.
Teach fundamentals of muscle usage.
Give students and understanding of what it means to have muscles engaged, and how they help during a dance. Also highlight the parts of the body that are relaxed.
Movement performed while abdominal muscles are engaged can easily be translated into motion through the arms. The Follow can feel (and thus follow) such movement.
Skiing and Lindy Hop have similarities:
When two magnets of opposite poles come close they attract, effectively sticking together. When they move slightly apart, they still seek each other out. Consider:
A way to introduce Charleston to new dancers:
Tips to improve the feeling of the basic Charleston steps:
These steps describe a way to teach how to lead and follow rock-steps in open position.
It should feel similar to the Sugar Push, at the point of the move when the Follow compresses into the Lead, then waits for the lead to transition out into Open Position.
Avoid teaching the history of Lindy Hop to beginners, especially those just learning East Coast Swing. Rather, wait until students are in a class devoted to Lindy Hop. Aspects of Lindy Hop that are fun to discuss include:
An interesting technique for introducing the Swing Out to new students follows:
The idea behind this move is to surprise the Follow with abrupt (but smooth) direction changes, using the same arm of the Follow.
Various comments on Leads and Follows who attended the workshop.