Improvisation Toolkit Vol. 2: Structure

Now that I have retired, my goal is to make sure that my work stays available to the next generation of dancers. So we are offering the entire Belly Dance Geek® catalog with "pay what you want" pricing here on Gumroad. Please note that all of our offerings are fully DIY, and do not include personal support.

- Nadira

Improvisation Doesn't Have to Mean Chaos

Do you worry about boring your audience, but “scribble” when you try to do more ?

Many dancers try to make their performance interesting by adding more “stuff”: more moves, more layers, more complexity.

All too often, that degenerates into a sloppy mish-mash of moves.

That’s called scribbling, and it’s a quick way to lose your audience’s attention.

You see, the more you throw into that mish-mash, the harder it is for your audience to follow your train of thought.  They can’t keep up, so they start to lose interest.

You can tell they’re getting bored, so you worry that you aren’t “good enough”.  You throw in even more stuff.  And they get even more overwhelmed.

Before long, you’re frantically ploughing though every move you know.  But you’ve already lost them.

So how do you break that cycle?

What most dancers don’t realize is that interesting dancing doesn’t need a lot of “stuff” – it needs structure.

In Volume 2 of the Improvisation Toolkit, you’ll learn how to structure your belly dance improvisation using:

• Continuity
• Alternation Patterns
• Theme & Variation
• Compositional Skeletons
• Safety Riffs

These tools will help you create a logical framework for your dance, so it will make sense to your audience.

Making the Conceptual Practical

Concepts are no good to you if you can’t draw on them while you improvise. So I’ll include a wide variety of exercises to help you internalize these concepts. These will include:

Sample Combinations

These are simple combinations that demonstrate the concepts. These only require advanced beginner technique, so dancers at any level can learn these ideas. More advanced dancers can use them first as a learning tool, and then as a base for more complex combinations that still make sense to the audience.

Guided Exercises

These allow you to practice improvising with these concepts in a safe, guided environment. These will be demonstrated first on-screen, then by voice-over, since you can’t learn to improvise by following along with me.

Journaling

To help you integrate these ideas into your own personal style.

Video Analysis Exercises

These empower you to expand your own structural repertoire by reverse-engineering how your favorite dancers organize their performances.

A Plug & Play Choreography

This will help you take these concepts out of the studio, and practice them in the context of a performance.

Make Your Dance Make Sense to Your Audience

With each structural concept you add to your toolbox, your dance will become more organized and make more sense to your audience.

And with plenty of guided, step-by-step practice, using these tools will soon become second nature, so you’ll never have to scribble again.