Refresh Your Rehearsal Process with the Elements of Dance

NDEO’s Guest Blog Series features posts written by our members about their experiences in the fields of dance and dance education. We continue this series with a post by Gina D'Antonio-Spears, Dance Educator, Portage Park Elementary School.  Guest posts reflect the experiences, opinions, and viewpoints of the author and are printed here with their permission. NDEO does not endorse any business, product, or service mentioned in guest blog posts. If you are interested in learning more about the guest blogger program or submitting an article for consideration, please click here. 

Do your students value the rehearsal process? My students think a dance is “done” when they have learned the last step. When they choreograph their own dances, they say, “I’m done” as soon as they have completed the assignment. When I try to spend 3-4 class periods rehearsing and cleaning a dance, they moan and groan. 

When I was a student, my dance teacher would say, “One more time!” but we knew it meant several more times. This is so common that they make tee shirts about it. So, how do we get our students to value the rehearsal process, and understand that even though the learning is complete, there is still more to do? To solve this problem, I teach specific dance elements during the rehearsal process, keeping each lesson feeling fresh while providing more practice time. 

Concept 1: Body Control 

For my youngest dancers, we learn that we must have body control at all times. We move when we need to move, and we are still when we need to be still. If you make a still body shape, it is body control that helps you stay still. 

With older students, we expand the meaning of body control. We silently enter the stage without doing anything silly, and we do not wave at the audience. If we have a beginning body shape, we should be able to hold the shape until the music begins. When we finish our dance, we control our bodies for the ending shape, the bow, and our exit. 

For middle and high school students, body control = professionalism. We do not play with our hair, fidget with our costumes, laugh or play with the other dancers, or talk during our performance. When students are making their own choreography, I ask them to consider where body control is needed in their dance. Are there moments of stillness within the dance, a beginning or ending body shape? Can body control help us cover our mistakes?

Concept 2: Energy 

Energy is a wonderful way to create dynamics in choreography. It refreshes the dance so it feels new and different in our bodies. As the dance improves, the students value the rehearsal process and their confidence grows because they can see and feel the improvements.

I love to focus on sharp and smooth energy to clean a dance. We discuss and embody what sharp and smooth feels like through creative movement exploration, improvisation, or a game. Then we clean the choreography, looking for places that could be enhanced with a sharp energy or a smooth energy. Imagery can be helpful so that students use their bodies more fully. Whatever the choreography is, there is a lesson in energy that can be used to clean the dance: heavy and light, direct and indirect, sudden and sustained, bound and free, depending on the style. 

Concept 3: Emotion 

Throughout my curriculum, we learn that dancers communicate with their bodies. We learn that dancers pretend when they are dancing. They pretend to be a butterfly, they pretend they are feeling sad, they pretend they are at a party. Dancers are not just dancers; they are actors as well. 

We do the emotion lesson when the mirrors are covered or while on stage. I begin the lesson by asking students, “What is this dance about? What do you think our facial expressions should be?” We practice just the facial expressions, without the choreography. For students that do not have much “acting” experience, this can be uncomfortable. Be sure to praise their efforts! They may giggle at first, so be patient. Have students sit on the floor, backs tall, and just rehearse facial expressions. You could practice all kinds of expressions, not just the ones in the dance. Then try specific emotions you want to see throughout the choreography. They could even close their eyes, perhaps using their arms to connect the emotion to the movement. When giggling is to a minimum and you are starting to feel a shift in the room, the students are ready to rehearse. 

Concept 4: Near and Far Space 

This concept is rehearsed on the stage and it helps put some final touches on the choreography. Near space is the space between the dancers, shared on the stage. Far space is the space in the audience, all the way to the back row. You could also connect the concept of relationships: between dancers, and between performers and audience. 

In this rehearsal, we focus on near space to work as an ensemble on stage. My students struggle with dancing in unison, especially when we transition to rehearsing on stage. The stage is much larger than my classroom, and when we spread out, it’s difficult for students to stay in time with one another. By focusing on near space, and thinking about how we are closer to our fellow performers than we are to the audience, we can strengthen our timing. 

As we think about far space, we “Play it to the back row!” The audience needs to feel our energy, emotions, and our overall performance. We reach through far space to make the audience feel something when we perform. 

By using each concept in a separate lesson, rehearsal is extended by four lessons. My students have something new to work on, which makes rehearsals less monotonous, and they begin to value the process. Over time, it has really improved student confidence on stage because students can see the improvements made in the dance.

Gina D’Antonio-Spears is a dance educator at Portage Park Elementary School in Chicago. She has been teaching dance for 36 years, with 27 years in the K-12 public school setting. She designs and facilitates professional development on topics such as arts integration, dance curriculum development, and standards-based instruction. She loves incorporating dance history, social emotional learning, and mindfulness into her teaching. She has been mentoring early years dance educators for over 10 years. She has mentored teachers in the NDEO Mentorship Program for every cohort. Gina has a BFA in Dance Education from Shenandoah University and a M.Ed. in Educational Leadership from American College of Education. Her motto is “Teaching students is my joy, teaching teachers is my passion.”

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Photo credits: All photos courtesy of Gina Spears