[aziyade]

part one

Ooooh girls, you’re going to love this one!

So you’re an intermediate or advanced level dancer who doesn’t have a lot of performance experience. You’ve got “the moves” -- but you’re thinking, “now what?”

Michelle Joyce’s new dvd series “Secrets of the Stage” is made for you, the dancer who is having trouble putting all you’ve learned together into one nice performance package. There’s something here for everyone: if you’re a choreographed dancer, there’s a section of improvisation drills. If you’re a technically proficient dancer but aren’t sure about your choreographic skills, there is ample discussion on making your dance interesting. If your on-stage energy isn’t what it should be, you’ll find expert advice from dancers who once suffered from the same problems. Practically paralyzed by stage fright? That’s covered here too, along with many other common performance problems.

I think I can say with confidence that this dvd is the first to actually offer individual analysis of entire dances – by the dancers themselves! Watching this dvd is like being backstage or in the green room of a major dance event. You’ll hear advice, suggestions, tips, tricks, and horror stories from professional dancers, all the while seeing performance concepts illustrated right there on the screen.

This dvd, volume 1 in the set, is arranged in three major sections for analysis: Calmness and Simplicity, You and Your Music, and Focus and Energy Projection. In between and after these sections are Practice Exercises to help get you started incorporating these concepts into your own dancing.

“Calmness” begins with an unusual approach – by showing you dance performances that didn’t go quite as planned. The dancers highlighted in this section discuss salvaging their performances from wardrobe and prop malfunctions, and give advice on how to keep calm and still enjoy yourself when things don’t go the way they did in practice.

After this section is a chapter on “Fight or Flight” which includes exercises and ideas to help you relax backstage and to help manage nervousness. The breathing techniques and short exercises demonstrated here are what the pros use to prevent backstage “freakout” before competitions and shows.

“Simplicity” is the next chapter and the discussion and performance analysis here centers around avoiding “overdancing” and that common phenomenon of throwing everything you know into the first 30 seconds of the song. There is so much good advice in this chapter I had to watch it several times to absorb it all.