photo credit: krossbowPracticing any kind of dance improvisation is scary when you first start out. You often won’t know what you’re doing or whether you’re even doing it right. Make sure you keep these five points in mind as you practice. They’ll guide you to a new level of confidence in your abilities.
1. Mistakes Are No Reason To Stop
If you allow it, your mistakes will discourage you from even attempting improvisation. I’ve been working on improvisation for ten years and still make mistakes every time I dance. That’s part of the process of dancing on the fly.
Eventually you’ll learn to improvise your way out of your errors; by using them the audience will never know that anything went wrong!
2. 50% Of Improvisation is Confidence
You have to look like you know what you’re doing. So even if you don’t know, fake it ’til you make it! If a contest was held pitting a great dancer with no confidence against a mediocre dance with lots of it, the audience would probably enjoy the mediocre one.
Why?
Because it requires a great deal of confidence to entertain an audience. A dancer without it doesn’t stand a chance. Bojangles, one of the greatest tap dancer in history, had a great reputation among dancers for his ability to “sell his steps.” He just made everything look better!
Take a page from his book and learn how you can begin to sell your steps. That’s half the battle.
3. There Is No Right Or Wrong
The purpose of improvisation is to spontaneously express yourself in a way that others can connect with. There is no right or wrong way to express yourself. So stop beating yourself up because you don’t yet improvise at the level you wish to. It will come if you continue to work at it.
Instead of seeing everything through the lens of right and wrong, start seeing it through the lens of “does it work or not.” When learning to improvise you’ll try a LOT of things, most won’t work but some will.
Over time you will amass a collection of tap steps that work and before you know it, you’ve got a repertoire!
4. Always Keep Your Discipline!
When you do get the chance to improvise with other dancers, you may find yourself wishing you had their speed, or clarity, or steps, or their rhythmic ability. If you’re not careful, you may be tempted to do things you have never done before in an attempt to be impressed.
That’s losing your discipline.
You must learn to “Do You” regardless of what anyone else does. Lose yourself and you’re left with nothing.
5. Be Inspired
Inspiration is an often overlooked key to improvisation. It’s what will motivate you to keep moving forward in the spirit of discovery. You must allow yourself to receive inspiration from what you see, what you do, what you hear, and from your mistakes. Without inspiration you will very quickly run out of ideas.
In fact, a good strategy to use when dancing with other dancers in a jam session is to draw inspiration from what they do. That doesn’t mean that you copy them. Instead, you allow their steps to remind you of things that are already a part of your repertoire.
This will allow you to produce new variations instantly without ever letting go of who you are.
In the end, the only way to succeed at improvisation is to start working on it and never stop. So what are you waiting for?
If you really want to learn to improvise, order a copy of my “Tap In The Moment” DVD today. In it I share 7 proven techniques that will have you learning & teaching tap improvisation in no time!
Follow this link to order your copy of the “Tap In The Moment” DVD now & start improvising!
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