At a certain point, nearly every dancer realizes that in order to progress with their dancing they need to take private lessons. Maybe group classes are too fast or too slow. Maybe they want to improve their technique. Maybe they want to prepare for a competition or create a routine. Private lessons can address all these issues, but at prices ranging from $30/hr (for a student discount given to a member of a college competition team) to $300/hr for a top-of-the-line coach to $31,000/hr (for a charity auction lesson with two-times Dancing With the Stars winner Cheryl Burke) these lessons can be a significant investment. These tips will help maximize your time and retention in your private lessons to get the most from your money.
Before the Lesson
Figure Out Your Goal
Spend some time thinking about what you want to get out of your private lesson. Are you trying to improve your social dancing or are you preparing for a competition or demonstration? Is there some major issue with your dancing you need to address? Are you having trouble leading or following? Do you need to work on your footwork? Some new pattern you didn’t quite “get” in class? Do you want to work on dips and aerials that aren’t safe to teach in group class? Do you just need to practice with someone who won’t let you get away with mistakes?
Once you know your goal, share it with the instructor. Do this when you book the lesson, as good teachers will create lesson plans, discuss your issues with other teachers at your studio, and observe you in class and practice If you don’t have anything specific you want to work on, tell the instructor that so they can make those preparations.
Warm Up
It takes most dancers a few minutes to get ready to dance. Muscles need to relax, steps need to be recalled, and then there’s the not-so-simple matter of letting go of outside stresses. Show up fifteen minutes to half an hour early to do some dancing. If you get warmed up before the lesson that’s less time warming up during the lesson.
During the Lesson
Be Flexible
Remember what we said about figuring out and communicating your goal beforehand? Think of the goal as a destination, the communication as a map, the lesson as a journey, and the teacher as a guide. Trust your teacher to take you there. They may see something in your dancing you didn’t know needed to be worked on, or it could be a problem caused by something seemingly unrelated. Above all, remember 1) you trust this person to teach you to dance, and 2) you’re here because of a problem that you couldn’t solve yourself; these both mean to trust his or her methods.
Take Notes
I am constantly amazed at the number of people who will spend thousands of dollars on lessons but won’t invest $1.50 in a notepad to retain what they learned during the lesson. And no, someone else’s notes don’t count. The very act of writing down material can help one to remember it later.
One Thing
You will get a lot of information in your lesson. A lot. This can be overwhelming if you try and implement it all at once. When you go into a lesson, think back to your goals and choose one thing that you will concentrate on, one thing that you will get by the end of the lesson. Keep it reasonable. “I will use perfect Cuban motion” is not a realistic goal for a private lesson, but “I will bend my leg at the right time for every step,” is.
After the Lesson
Practice
Even more prevalent than the number of people who don’t or won’t take notes during lessons, are those who don’t or won’t practice, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. If you don’t practice your won’t remember. It’s that simple.
Then Practice Again
To retain whatever you worked on in the lesson, it should be practiced immediately after the lesson, ten minutes after, an hour after, twenty-four hours after, and a week after. Dancing is more like learning a sport than book learning. We can’t just learn it in our heads; we have to learn it in our feet, our legs, our bodies. Specifically, we need to build muscle memories. Martial artists talk about high-path and low-path reactions, the former being a complete action or series of actions that occurs when we consciously trigger it, the latter occurring completely automatically and instinctively. The former takes three-hundred repetitions to build, the latter eight to ten-thousand. Don’t want to count repetitions? Use this rough guideline, then: you should spend one hour practicing for every hour of class time, and three hours for every hour of private lessons.
January 24, 2012 at 7:49 PM |
[...] one wants to work on with one’s teachers. In fact, it was one of the main points in our second article. In order to achieve one’s goals in dance, as in any discipline, it is crucial to identify [...]