We talk a lot here about setting goals for yourself and your dancing, but not often about evaluating those goals. It’s all well and good to declare that one wants to to win the Ohio Star Ball’s amateur Latin division, but if one isn’t making progress towards that victory, the goal may as well not exist. The point of a goal is to both give direction but also measure to progress. Conducting your own review, or dance audit, can help you to figure out if you’re on track to meet your goals, or if you need to change tactics.
A dance audit is any time you evaluate your progress as a dancer. It can be done formally, with lists and charts and videos, or informally where you just sit back and think about your dancing. For our purposes, I’m going to recommend formally. Many studios, particularly franchise studios, conduct their own dance reviews, but you can still do this on your own or with minimal help.
Begin by making a list of all your original dance goals, and the goals you had a year ago. If you’ve written them down before, this will be easy. If not, recollect them as best you can and write them down now. These goals may be anything: they may describe comfort levels or other intangible levels of proficiency, patterns you wanted to learn, competitions you wanted to win, performances you wanted to do, techniques you wanted to integrate, or anything else having to do with your dancing. Just get them down on paper.
Next, have someone video your dancing. This should be with a partner, whether your regular partner (if you have one) or your teacher. I recommend recording two dances, a smooth/standard dance and a rhythm/Latin dance, each about a minute or so in length. Now, watch the video. Most dancers rarely, if ever, get to actually see themselves dance, and if this is your first time watching yourself dance, this is likely to be an uncomfortable experience. For myself, it generally takes about six months before I can watch a video – any video – of myself without cringing, as initially I tend to focus on the mistakes. That said, it can be a very helpful process.
If you have a video of yourself from the past year, watch it and compare to the new video. Note the improvements (and there will be improvements). Write them down. If you don’t have such a video, ask your instructor to watch the new video and compare to your dancing a year ago. Now, get out your list of previous goals. Note which goals have been achieved, particularly as evident in your video, which goals show improvement even if they’re not accomplished, and which goals have shown no progress.
Now comes the hard part of the audit. After seeing which goals have had progress, and which ones haven’t, it becomes time to evaluate the methods of progress. It may be that it’s time to leave your current teacher or studio, particularly if you’re not seeing progress to your goals. On the other hand, if you’ve seen a lot of progress with your current teacher, consider increasing your lessons with him or her. The idea in this phase is to make an objective assessment of the causes for one’s impovement or failure to improve, and make appropriate changes.
Finally, make a new list of goals for your next audit. As we’ve said before, goals can be anything dance-related, quantifiable or non-quantifiable, but get them written down so that a year from now you can look back and your goals and figure out if you’re making appropriate progress. Save your evaluation video, as it will play a key role in your evaluation.
One last note: while self-evaluation is an enormous component of evaluating progress in any art, it’s often helpful to get another’s opinion. Consider booking a half-hour with your teacher, or even a visiting coach, to help you conduct your audit, define what areas need improvement, and help you come up with a plan to get there.
Tags: Evaluations, Feedback, Goals
