You’ve finished your routine? Great! Now how do you push through the season and get better at every competition? Well if you want my advice, read on. Here is my clean-up process from beginning to end:
1. The Slow-Mo
This is a must when you’ve just finished a routine. Start from the beginning of the routine and have athletes stop on every single count. This gives you plenty of time to check that every movement is at the perfect angle and on the right count. When you’ve moved through roughly 20 seconds, go back to the beginning and run through it again slightly faster. Anymore than 20 seconds and you’ll find that your corrections go in one ear and out the other. When you've drilled it, take your slow-mo a step further. Find an application which allows you to slow down your music (Youtube has a feature for this!) and have the athletes dance in slow motion... minus the technique. You'll find it's a way less monotonous way to spot those little mistakes and inconsistencies in positioning.
2. Choreograph some Acapella
Maybe I shouldn’t say this if all your routines are finished, but one of my favourite techniques is to choreograph some acapella. For example in pom full-team cleans and claps help to sharpen up and stay on beat. In lyrical and jazz, cleans and slaps can keep the team together. Even if the last thirty seconds have been a car crash, if everyone jumps to clean on the same count you’re back in the game. These homogenous movements act as a reset button for your dancers and are very easy to add in during the cleanup process.
2. Technique Troubles - Placement
A curved, soft ballet arm makes a beautiful line. However, 20 dancers of different heights and varying levels of ballet training trying to do a ballet arm together? Maybe less so. If movements in the routine are looking messy even after you’ve clarified their placement, try thinking through more homogenous movements which would create a similar look. In jazz teams, it’s often a judgement call between cleanliness and style. For example, a completely straight arm with a blade is far easier to look clean than a more stylised Fosse arm, but maybe in your routine the Fosse arm would be more appropriate. In any style, it’s always worth considering the height differences on your team too. If you have a team plie, your taller athletes may have to bend lower. Your shorter athletes may need to pull up a bit higher. Lastly, never stop drilling technical placement. While it's hard to find time in full swing of competition season, take five minutes at the start of class to work through some foundational technique. It will pay dividends on the floor.
3. Technique Trouble - Turns
Unfortunately there are really no quick fixes to clean turn timing… it’s about the repetition and it’s about the fight. Make sure that when you’re drilling to counts you are counting at the same tempo as the music the routine is set to. Also try to count very sharply even if the turns are to a beautiful, flowy lyrical song. I’ve found that sometimes it helps to replace your counts with the action you’d like to do. For example, instead of ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,’ try ‘1, up, 3, up, 5, up, 7, up,’ to get your athletes pushing to releve at the same time. A warning here - using 'down' to signify the heel dips tends to encourage dancers to bend too deeply in their plie and become jumpy in the turn. I find focussing on the 'up' works best. Take videos often, pause and scroll through them in slow motion. When your dancers heels are tapping down in a la seconds, are their feet pointing to the corner as they should? When your dancers set for pirouettes, are they pushing off on beat or hesitating to turn? These minuscule variations cause your turns to have that ‘off’ look.
4. Technique Trouble - Jumps and Leaps
Kind of the same thing here - sorry folks! Lots of drilling and repetitions will help the athletes to improve their timing and ensure the skills are all ‘popping’ together! If you find your jumps look like popcorn, it helps to stress the count the athletes should land on, as opposed to the one when they should hit the peak of their skill. A really great trick for leaps and jumps is to play the routine music have the athletes perform them facing each other. You'll find that they start to sync up skills themselves, or else they'll notice that they're off and want to fix them.
5. Eliminate the Wobbles
Here is a brutal one. If you want a clean routine, you might have to do something about the bobbling on pirouettes. Alternatively it may be the aerials which only hit 50% of the time. As coaches we walk the line between wanting to be successful at competitions, and wanting to push our dancers. Unfortunately just because a dancer can hit a quad on a good day doesn’t mean that they are consistent enough to be in a competition routine. Not only because of the scoresheet, but for the anxiety level of the dancer, the team and yourself. The price you pay across the scoresheet for travelling on a la seconds, or holding super stiff leg holds is never worth it. Better to hit a clean and easy routine than fumble through a difficult one. Taking out shaky, worrisome technique and replacing it with a clean dance section is almost always worth your while.
6. To Break or Not to Break
Go through the whole routine (again, it helps to run in small chunks to make sure it’s sinking in!) and specify whether the transition between a motion is a slice or a break. Though they may seem insignificant, they make a huge difference to overall team uniformity. Clarify the pathways that limbs make throughout.
7. Video Games
Under normal circumstances I hate having phones out in my class, but they can come in handy! Have your team split off in pairs and video each other going full out. Every athlete is their own toughest critic, and we don't always need to tell them what they're doing wrong. Giving them a video to look at works wonders.
8. Half & Half It!
Pair up the athletes in your team and number them 1 and 2. Let 1's go full out while 2's watch them. Give them lots of time for feedback then switch over. This works particularly well if you pair up athletes who do similar roles in the routine, or dance opposite one another. It might seem counterintuitive to have half of the team sit out, but it’s a great way to encourage athletes to take feedback from everyone as well as find niggling mistakes you might miss!
9. Head and Hands So we’ve finally got every limb and pathway in the right place - fantastic! Now it’s time to fine-tune. Take a head and hands run. That is, work through your full routine and specify where heads should be. Make sure the athletes are turning their full heads, rather than just looking with their eyes - this is super common with junior and senior teams. In pom, you’ll often find that more advanced athletes begin to let their motion placement go, so really be aware of their wrist positioning throughout. In jazz and lyrical specify hand shaping throughout. These details are tiny, but they take a good team to a great team.
10. Sound of Silence This is one of my favourites for a week or two before a comp. The dancers are stressed and irritated by how boring cleaning practices have become. A great challenge for your athletes can be modelled as preparation for ‘what we’re going to do it the music cuts out.’ A pom team will usually be conditioned to keep counting out loud, but a lyrical team? Try challenging your athletes to finish the dance. Set up from the very beginning, count out the first 8 count for them, and then let them go. The teams who can keep time all the way to the end are the ones who are competition ready!
11. And of course my last clean-up tip… get someone else to do it for you!
Not only is an extra set of eyes invaluable, but a change in teaching style will excite your athletes to one of the least glamorous parts of their season!
Wishing you the very best of luck for the season ahead!
Love and Cheers,
MJ
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