What's She Doing Now

So some of you may not know, but I teach dance classes. Ballet, tap, jazz, and lyrical. About 22 classes a week. I absolutely love it. It’s one of the most rewarding parts of my life.

It’s the time of year to start all of our new routines. It can be a very overwhelming task if you have a lot of classes or if you are new to teaching dance. I’m going to show how to break down your music into smaller and more manageable chunks.

First, you’re going to sit down and count how many 8 counts you have in your music. Make sure if you are going to cut your music it’s already done before you start this exercise. We’re going to use ‘Rockin Around the Christmas Tree’ by Brenda Lee since we’re prepping for our Winter Progress Performance.

As you can see that song has 36 counts of 8. Next we’re going to write an 8 on each line of our paper.

Now that we can see the whole song we’re going to start making marks where each musical sentence changes. An example is going from the intro of just music into actual lyrics. Here’s how it looks for this particular song.

I’m going to have you make a note that your dance should be changing transitions at least every musical sentence. There is nothing more boring than a straight line of 3 year olds for 2 minutes straight. If you start early, I promise they can handle some transitions.

Now we’re going to break down our song. We’re going to mark the intro, verses, pre-chorus, chorus, and bridge. You may have a more complex song that has extra parts – call them whatever you want! As long as you know what they mean it’s all that matters.

There. You can plan your weeks so much now that you can see how much choreography you need. Halloween is in 9 weeks and if you’re doing a winter show you need your chore done by then. That means you’ll need to do 6 counts of 8 every week to keep you on schedule.

Hope this helps you work through your choreography. It has really helped me over the years. Once everything is done I type it all up, print it, and put it in my binder. It’s also great for the kids to copy, send out to the parents, or have the older kiddos take photos of your notes. Happy counting!