Un-Traveling

 

How to travel when you have
nowhere to go

(This post is dedicated to my Improvisation Safety Net students. Many of them are filming their homework in small spaces, so they’re dealing with these issues first-hand!)

 

I did one of my favorite shows on a postage stamp.

(Okay, that’s not quite accurate. It was more like a strip of three postage stamps.)

The space was a good twelve feet wide, but only three feet deep. There was so little space between the tables and the band that the fringe on my belt whacked the microphone stands when I spun!

That didn’t keep me from enjoying the show. I had great music, an enthusiastic audience, and the sweetest, most respectful restaurant owners I’ve ever met.

But traveling in that space took some figuring out!
 
They used to say a great dancer could do an entire show on one floor tile.

And that’s true. One of the great things about belly dance is that we have lots of ways to create texture in our dance without moving around the stage.

But traveling is an important tool in our artistic toolkit.
 

Traveling makes your dance interesting.

It helps you:

• Add variety without cramming in more moves.
• Increase the energy level without exhausting you.
• Automatically incorporate different body angles and stage positions.

 

But we don’t always get much room for traveling.

Belly dancers often perform in small spaces. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to get a stage or full dance floor.

But very often, we’re dancing in:

• Someone’s living room
• A tiny dance floor
• The gap between the tables and the restaurant’s kitchen

We even practice in small spaces. Except for the lucky studio owners out there, most of us practice in living rooms, kitchens, or basements. (My home studio is a 12′ x 14′ bedroom.)

But even in a tiny space, you don’t have to dance in place!

 

Three keys to travel in small spaces

Traveling can be effective in small spaces. The trick is to make it very very clear to your audience. You can do that with three simple techniques.
 

 

1) Keep your line of travel very clean

When you don’t have far to travel, it’s important that you keep your line of travel very VERY crisp.

• Keep your circles nice and round, with no possibility of corners.
• Make your straight lines stick-straight, with no meandering.
• If your space is long and skinny, you can do ovals instead of circles. But make them super-clean, rounded ovals, not rectangles!

Imagine that you’re a train traveling on a track, and don’t get derailed!

 

2) Telegraph your intention to the audience

You can use other aspects of your dance to signal the direction to your audience.

Your gaze can indicate the direction of travel:

• If you’re traveling sideways, let your gaze point sideways too.
• If you’re advancing on the audience, look ’em in the eye.
• If you’re retreating from the audience, look slightly upward.

Your arm frame can point the way:

• In asymmetrical arm positions, like “L”, point the lower arm in the direction you’re going.
• Arms in front of you or in a “giving” pathway emphasize advancing on the audience.
• Rising arms emphasize retreating from the audience.

 

3) Take your time

Just because you don’t have far to go doesn’t mean you have to get there quickly. Slow progress still reads as traveling to the audience.  

And it lets you create a nice yummy traveling phrase without running out of space.

So really milk the full pathway by taking teeny tiny steps. (Think of those tiny Sugar-Plum-Fairy-ballerina-gliding-en-pointe-bourree steps.)

See if you can spend 8 counts on each “leg” of your journey. Then see if you can do it in 16 counts.

 

Dos & Don’ts

Do:  Make your traveling smooth and continuous.

Jerky, stop-and-start traveling makes it hard for the audience to understand your traveling “statement”.

Don’t:  Ignore these skills, just because you have a large practice space.

You never know when you’ll be performing on a postage stamp!

 

Summary

Traveling is one of the easiest ways to make your dance interesting. But the small spaces we practice and perform in make traveling tricky.

To travel effectively in a small space, we need to make the traveling as clear as possible to our audience.  

We can do that by keeping the line of travel clean, telegraphing our intention through gaze and arm position, and traveling slowly.

It’s also important to keep that traveling smooth, since jerkiness obscures our intention.

 

Next Steps

Next time you practice, try out the three techniques:

• Clean lines of travel
• Telegraphing
• Take your time

(And if you have a big practice space, pretend you don’t! You can use chairs or shoes to block of a smaller space.)

 

Your Turn

Do you ever perform or practice in small spaces?

How do you make traveling work for you?

What are the other challenges of dancing in small spaces?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

 

p.s. Today’s image is courtesy of the NASA Goddard  Space Flight Center, via Flickr

p.p.s.  If you’re curious about that show, you can see the intro on video.  (Horrible, grainy video, but hey.)  And wow, I can’t believe that was five years ago!

 

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