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Anyone have previous dance experience ??? or performance kind of experience
So curious!!!! I never had I still feel like i don’t do the dancing aspect…. or performing aspect – also what got you better at performing ! ?
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9 Replies
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I don’t have a dance background but I perform a lot (singing) and it’s helped me like in terms of being aware of the details
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I performed with a belly dance troupe for years and recently have done some aerial performances. The only way to get better at performing is to perform. I still get nervous and our troupe danced at a renaissance fair or 3 years with 5 shows a day! Honestly I can’t even imagine performing with pole because of the sweat issue. I’m slick after one combo, can’t imagine an entire song!
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yes i have been doing bellydance for years. But thats it. I still suffer from free styles with pole and bellydance. I am so use to choreography. Thats why im trying my best NoW to practice free style with pole. I perfrmed 0n stage many times 0nly with bellydance never with p0le yet…and still till this day i shake… i mess up i get scared. and i cant d0 certain m0ves my best bc 0f the shaking. but… the audience that is there is always happy t0 see us. they l0ve what we d0. thats what always made me just g0 thr0ugh with it with a smile bc i kn0w they l0ve the entertainment. And in all h0nesty i cant see half the audience bc 0f the lights in my eyes and be i d0nt have my glasses 0n >< s0 that is an0ther thing i use t0 my advantage just dance f0r myself it feels like =). thats when i put in h0w i feel and try t0 sh0w em0ti0n.
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Hi, I had some performance experience before starting pole, in jazz, street and contemporary (all choreographed and mostly end-of-year school performances) – I find that compared to my fellow pole learners I am a lot less nervous about performing, I think that my previous experience made me learn that mostly the audience can’t dance and so they are always impressed with what you do, especially if it’s a pole show, and also they don’t know what you are planning to do, so they will not spot certain things you might think are mistakes. Dancers see shows in a very different way – so competition performances are a different story, however, although they can spot details and mistakes, they are much more appreciative of what you do because they know what it takes! Sometime with a public audience you might get disappointed by some reactions: you do something really difficult and they don’t seem impressed, then you do something really simple which looks pretty and they’re like ‘wow’, so sometimes it’s best to keep it simple and pretty and then build up to make harder moves look simple and pretty…
Generally, I was always bad with freestyle, I used to go to a street locking class where the teacher always made us freestyle at least for a little bit of the class and I always used to freeze… never got used to it. However, with the pole now I freestyle at home and sometimes in class and I found that the home practice where there is no one to see me has helped a lot both with confidence and improving my style, it’s also helped with details as I record it and learn a lot from it, and I think I got better at performing choreographed pieces as well.
As for looking at the audience, which might be scary but it’s impressive to do, once a teacher told us the trick that if you look at the audience’s foreheads from the stage, to them it seems like you are looking at them in the eyes, it works! that was a neat little trick! -
well said lula.
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I went back to school to get my English degree and during that I rediscovered dance through Zumba. I got my dancee minor in 2012, got certified as a Zumba instructor in 2010.
I took an amazing class for my degree: theory and improvisation. The key to improvisation (essentially freestyle) is to build your dance vocabulary IN your body. The bigger your movement “vocabulary”, the more fluid connections you make between movements. Speed, levels, range of motion, distance traveled from center–even stillness–all create interest and make for dynamic movement. Also…KNOWING the music you will dance to REALLY well helps because you can anticipate where you might go. Avoid “kamikaze” freestyle where you don’t know the music! -
Thanks deb5600, I think that’s really useful. I did my foundation course back in 2005/2006 and theory and impro were really useful to learn to build a vocabulary and helped a lot with building choreographies, but I think I had forgotten what we need to do to build a vocabulary for freestyle and you explain it really well. That of course also explains why we tend to do the same moves over and over again in our fresstyles, because they are the ones that our body remembers, so I guess it’s useful to force ourselves to build in one move at a time into the freestyle and then we will build the body memory?
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I used to dance a lot as a kid, and because of that it´s given me the confidence to dance in front of lots of people. Obviously as a kid it was nerve-wracking, but now I’m not as shy. I used to do modern dance, tango, and flamenco. Flamenco was great, but there’s lots of turning involved which I was never really good at because I couldn’t spot very well.
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Well I did High School Cheerleading and Drama and I did my fair share of dancing. When it comes to Pole doing those other 2 things helps me get comfortable in the positions that you have to get yourself into and the confidence to know that if you don’t get the trick right away, you eventually will. My issues that I still don’t always can get is feeling sexy. Sometimes I think I’m doing a move all sorts of sexy then I look in the mirror and it just isn’t and then I could just be trying to figure something out and my husband would come by and tell me how sexy I look. I’m totally baffled because I’m in the stages of figuring it out, I’m still clumsy. lol So then I just recently got it in my head to not over think and to not try and perfect certain moves. sometimes your body just needs to get used to the movement or pose. When it comes to performance just have fun. The Audience will feed off of that and in turn you will feed off of them. Oh and another thing is to choose music that you can use movement to help tell the story or has that unique beat where you could put a sassy move or pose, like its perfectly on that beat. If you get the chance look at some burlesque performances they tend to do that well.
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