How Themes Keep Your Practice Flexible

 

Themes are Like Yoga for Your Dance Practice

 
They keep it flexible, yet focused.
 
 
 

My practice habit started with a panic goal.

I had an important show to prepare for, and I was terrified that I’d embarrass myself. So I decided to practice my piece every day in the weeks leading up to the event.

I got lucky.

By the time the event rolled around, I noticed how much better I felt when I did a daily practice. After 14 years of feast-or-famine practice, I finally felt like a real dancer, just because I was showing up every day. So I kept it up.

But goals usually create a yo-yo effect.

My previous panic goals (all several dozen of them) resulted in feast-or-famine practice: I’d cram like crazy for the event, then do nothing for days, weeks, or even months.
 

Chasing goals can hurt your long-term progress.

They make practice something that we do in the short-term, instead of a life-long practice.

They make practice the means to an end, instead of something that we do because it has value in itself.

And so they make practice temporary.

It’s a chore that we can stop doing once we reach our goal.

To build a long-term, sustainable dance practice, we can’t simply chase goals.
 

Instead of setting goals, choose themes.

A theme is an area that you’d like to work on.

This may sound a lot like a goal, but they’re not the same thing at all.

A goal is an external outcome you want to achieve.
 
A theme is a topic you’re interested in for its own sake.
 

Themes are better than goals for three reasons:

1) Themes focus you without pigeon-holing you
A theme is an umbrella topic. For any theme you can think of, there are multiple skills that falls under the umbrella.

That keeps your practice time flexible: you can work on anything that improves your themes. But it also keeps you focused, since you always know that you’re working towards something concrete.
 
2) It’s easy to decide how to spend your practice time
When you show up to practice, all you have to do is choose an activity that will improve one of your themes.
 
3) Themes are within your control
As James Clear pointed out in this insightful piece, goals almost always rely on factors that are outside our control.

That means that we won’t always achieve them, even with our best effort. That can lead us to give up on practicing, even though we get tons of other benefits from practicing.
 

Let’s take a closer look at how to work with themes.

  

How to Integrate Themes Into Your Practice:

1) Pick three themes you want to work on
Choose three things that you want to improve or cultivate in the near-to-medium term. These can be as vague or specific as you want.
 
2) Identify its skills
List a couple of specific skills that will help you make progress on those themes.
 
3) Identify some activities
Then list a couple of specific activities that will help you build those skills. (5-10 activities total is fine.) Think of this as your practice menu.

This can easily be done in 10 or 15 minutes, and will give you enough material to work on for weeks.
 
4) Work on those activities
When you show up to practice, pick whichever activity that appeals to you most at that moment, and get started.

Or if you’re feeling ornery (like I do sometimes when I feel like my life is over-planned), you can chuck the menu entirely, and play with another area.
 
5) Revise as desired
Your themes aren’t a prison sentence. You can retire a theme or put it on the back-burner whenever you’re happy with the amount of progress you’ve made, or if you’re more excited about another theme.
 

Let’s Look at an Example:

 
My Favorite Themes

Here are the three themes I’ve prioritized most in the last two years:
 

1) Work up to full-length routines

I’ve had several injuries in the last few years, and my endurance has suffered the most. I really want to get back into performing with my favorite bands, but that usually calls for a full 25-30 minute set.

Originally, this was tied to a goal I was chasing: to get back on the schedule at my favorite venue. But that’s not entirely within my control: whether I can do that depends on whether the owner chooses to book me, whether there’s room on the roster, etc.

What I can control is whether I’m prepared. So my theme is to be able to do full-length sets.
 
Activities that support this theme:

• Run full routines at home (improvising)
• Work on my veil-handling skills
• Brush up on my drum solo vocabulary
• Improvise to common song choices for each section of the 6-part routine
• Do dance-based cardio workouts

 

(For a while, I was doing cardio on the elliptical, but I found that actual dancing contributed more to this theme.)

 

2) Improve my arm carriage

My arms are acceptable, but I really want to get them to gorgeous: to make them clean, graceful, extended, and interesting.
 
Activities that support this theme:

• Drill arm pathways (plain, with zils, and with dancing)
• Improvise, prioritizing arm carriage
• Increase the percentage of time my arms are overhead as I practice
• Practice this without mirror input, memorizing what strong arms feel like

 

3) Get really really good at zils

Zils are something my teacher prioritized, so I’ve always been a strong ziller for my level. But this is something that I want to be part of my signature as a performer. I want to be great at zils.
 
Activities that support this theme:

• Improve my precision and speed with 16th notes
• Improve my precision and speed with multi-tonal patterns
• Cultivate more complicated dancing while playing more complicated zils
• Cultivate more stylized zil strokes
• Improve my zil solo (like a drum solo, but with zils)

 

Can you see how much flexibility that gives me?

That gives me a nicely-curated menu of options that will suit just about any mood or energy level I could have.

But I know that anything I choose off that menu will be productive, because it will help me make progress towards my themes.
 
It even accommodates Bright Shiny Object Syndrome

Sometimes, your attention strays. This happens to everybody, and I’m no exception.

Anything can throw my priorities for a loop: a new DVD, seeing a fabulous performance, or even a whim. I just get that strong feeling: I have to work on that, and I have to do it right now!

Usually, that would be a recipe for disaster: it would throw me off track and completely undermine my goals.

By setting themes instead of goals, I can follow any whim that still fits under my theme.
 
For example:

I was absolutely blown away by Shaharzad’s drum solo performance at the Las Vegas Belly Dance Intensive.

It made me want to cultivate the deep abdominal precision she used so beautifully to interpret the drum.

Abdominal work was on my “C-list” at the time: it was something I wanted to work on at some point, but it wasn’t a high (or even a medium!) priority.

But because that would add a lot of variety to how I interpret my drum solos, it would fit under my full routines theme.

And I’ve been having a great and productive time working on that!
  

So think about your themes.

If it’s hard to chose just three, brainstorm 10.

Then narrow it down to 5.

Then narrow that down to the 3.

And file the other 7 away somewhere safe, so you’ll know you can return to them later.

Then make your skills list, and your activities menu.

Then get to work!