Not enough time to practice whenever you want? Need to rehearse a choreography but you haven’t got a place? You have to create a piece or prepare a class, but you are too busy or on a trip? I’m going to give you an unfailing trick to help your movement and your imagination: visualize your dance.

Sometimes you don’t have time to dance, life is full of circumstances, and we have to learn to deal with them, and therefore take any chance we have to practice dance. 

I’m going to tell you about a trick I have been developing over the years. Which is rooted in a critical need I wouldn’t wish happened to you. I have trouble falling asleep.

I realized that counting sheep was useless (as counting makes me focus instead of sleepy), but mentally reviewing the last classical Indian dance odissi choreography I learned did help me fall asleep.  

Classical Indian Dance choreographies are pretty long, usually starting at 8 minutes, and for me, it was literally like telling myself a story. I visualize my dance with every possible detail: counts and rhythm, feet, hands… Sometimes I am the dancer, and sometimes I watch the choreography from the audience.

This has reinforced my choreographic memory significantly, helping me to fall asleep while dancing. It’s true that the first parts of the choreography are the most reviewed ones. That’s why sometimes I start where I think I fell asleep the previous night.

VISUALIZE YOUR DANCE

This trick I’m sharing is not at all new, or something you wouldn’t have figured out by yourself. Sometimes the fact of visualizing our dance is not given the importance it should be. It widens your imagination, and as a result, the movement imaginary, it enhances your choreographic memory. It also gives your the opportunity to review or create in dance wise unfavorable situations. And it is very cool because it connects you with the movement even though you can’t perform it at that moment. 

• Make sure you know which music to dance to. You will need to know perfectly the song, or play it and listen to it to be able to visualize your dance.

• Focus and imagine your body in a certain place. You have to see the reaction of your body to the music clearly, if there is any mistake, if there is a movement you are struggling to fit to the rhythm, if you can improve something that is not working for you…

• You can choose to be the active subject (the dancer) or the passive subject (the audience). I almost always choose to be the dancer, but sometimes I watch myself dancing from the outside so I can imagine the range of motion. 

• Most of all: make the best of the “dead time”. I visualize my dance when I’m on the subway, if I feel like dancing, but I can’t do it due to the lack of space, when I travel… In moments when I can truly focus and connect my inner look. 

I hope this post is helpful in some way, and thank you for reading. 

Don’t forget that you can study with me wherever you are on my online classroom (don’t miss the latest updates)

Thank you for your support,

Elizabeth Medina