Congratulations! Whether you have decided to try out your first dance event or this is your third event this year, this is a milestone worth celebrating.
Not only will participating in a dance event improve your dancing, it should also improve who you are as a student.
This blog post is a 22-step strategy (divided into 2 parts) to give you the best return on your investment!
6 Months in Advance
1.Don’t Just “Plan” Early
There’s a difference between thinking of planning something and actually committing to it. The best first step for any big dance event is to commit early. You can do this by marking out your calendar, informing your teacher, and securing your deposit. Why? Because the moment you take a decisive action towards participating, the more decisive your teacher can be on your strategy for improvement.
2.Take Inventory
You need to step back and have a transparent look at what projects need the most attention. This is a great way to make the most of your lessons and visits with coaches/dance consultants.
3.Set Some Layered Goals
Let’s look at three different types of goals: Safe, Stretch, Ultimate.
A Safe Goal is your basic survival goal. What are some things that, no matter what, we know we have the ability to achieve? These goals can be things like “by the time we go to the event, we should have at least one advanced pattern in our open sequences”.
A Stretch Goal is something that is currently a touch out of reach, but can be attained with a little effort. Something like “Let’s upgrade all of our Associate level closed sequences to Full level sequences before the competition.”
An Ultimate Goal is something that is currently outside of your control or may take a longer timetable to reach. For example, “Have hip action present in all Rhythm dances” or “have 90 second open sequences finished in 9 dances.”
3 Months in Advance
4.Use Your Coaches Wisely
Every Arthur Murray consultant is like an expert tour guide for the event you’re going to be attending. It’s important to utilize them to help you accelerate your goals and get a better idea on what they are typically looking.
You can enlist the help of a consultant for things like choreography, technique, or finishing details. Just by committing early to the event and sharing that with the next dance coach, you’ll be well on your way to receiving a far better return on your investment.
5.Expand Your Net
The sooner you can laugh, smile, and enjoy yourself on a dance floor, the sooner your dancing will start to resemble what it looks like in the studio. This can be done by adding some new or “low priority” dances to your roster.
Whether it’s Country Western, Merengue, Hustle, or Polka – these dances are all fun, may not have as much depth, and will therefore help you achieve a much more important goal of smiling, burning off nervous energy, and giving you a much needed break.
6.Recalibrate Your Schedule
If you haven’t done so already, with 3 months to go, it’s probably a good time to start making adjustments to your schedule to ensure that your goals can be met.
If you think of your dance program like a fitness program, it’s important that each area of your program – closed syllabus, open syllabus, and routines are all getting the appropriate attention.
The goal is to do as much as possible now to lock in muscle memory, rather than waiting until the last minute and being overwhelmed.
One Month Out
7.Fun & Drills
With two weeks to go there shouldn’t be a lot of changes to your choreography or last minute additions to your dance program. Your goal during this time is to lock in the physical details while reducing your stress in the process. This can be done by doing event simulations, working on finishing details, and breaking up any monotony with some of your fun dances.
8.Find Your Key Words
There is a mental filing cabinet you’ve been filling up for each and every dance. One of the biggest things that can cause that “deer in the headlights” look is when you’re actively attempting to sift through those mental files at a dance event.
Instead, let’s try something else. What would be the most important, descriptive word you could use to associate with a particular dance? Maybe “glide” is for Foxtrot, or “graceful” for the Waltz. This helps the most important, keyword related, elements bubble to the top of your brain when you’re at the event. This narrows the field of choices, and allows you to bypass the “remembering” and focus instead on execution.
9.Find the Milestones
This is an excellent opportunity to celebrate the milestones that you’ve achieved. The dance event itself isn’t the process. The event is the culmination of the work you’ve done. There will be a lot going on at the event, so take the time now to celebrate the milestones and take inventory of the goals you set out to achieve.
10.Emergency Protocols
Every school has some type of drill to prepare the students for an emergency. This is the time to do the same for your dance event. Whether they are physical emergencies like “what do we do if someone bumps into us on the dance floor?” or goal related emergencies like “what do we do if we start to feel disappointed at the event”. Outlining your responses to these situations before the event is like conducting a fire drill before there’s a fire.
Any performance or production in any industry will have something that doesn’t go exactly according to plan. So why not plan for that? Doing so before the event levels up your strategy and adds one of the most important skills to your dance hobby: Resilience.
At the Event
11.Worry Reduction
If you’ve been following this process so far, there may be a lot of potential worry that has been averted. Weirdly enough, this can be a double-edged sword.
On one hand, you’re ready for action! You’re not taxing your brain and cramming in dance details. On the other hand, the hotel of worry in your brain now has a vacancy. And just like any hotel in the world, your first instinct will be to fill it.
This may come out in the form of worrying about the schedule, the amount of time to change in between the events, or even your hair and makeup. This isn’t suggesting that those things aren’t relevant but the goal is to reduce the amount of worry on your plate and focus on the task at hand.
PART 2 COMING SOON!
Source Article by: arthurmurraylive.com
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