Why Should You Teach and Motivate Your Students To Create Their Own Choreographies?
As a teacher, I am always pushing my students to create their own choreographies. After one year of learning, they have sufficient knowledge to create a simple choreography to a simple music like a pop song and they will improve their dancing by leaps and bounds by doing so.
1. They will be practicing and improving their technique. Especially if they know they will perform it to an audience or even if it’s only for their classmates (about this issue, read the post Why Is It Important To Create Performance Opportunities For Your Students?), they will practice their technique as much as they can (“the teacher is watching and evaluating us, uuuhhhh…” ).
2. Creating choreographies will widen their dance vocabulary as they will be searching (or even creating) new steps to express themselves. These steps will become part of the student’s vocabulary, enabling them to express themselves better the next time they dance (either choreography or improvisation).
3. They will be finding out (and the teacher as well) the steps they like the most and how they feel the music, what songs they like the most, their musical interpretation, etc., in other words, they will start their path of finding themselves and their dancing style (it’s a long road this one, but better start early).
4. Finally, with your guidance they will also start developing their choreographic skill (which is not the same as dancing): it’s about knowing how to tell a story, how to create different dynamics, allure and surprise the audience, and so on. As in dancing (and everything really), if there is no practice there is no learning or improvement. So, for them to learn how to create a choreography they need their teacher to teach them how to do it (see my 5 Tips To Create A Choreography post) and they need to put it into practice.
Teaching a student how to dance is much more than teaching steps, it’s giving them wings to fly: giving them the vocabulary and the knowledge to express themselves, helping them to discover and free themselves, making them accept who they are and not being afraid to share that with others.
Motivating and helping them to create their own choreographies is a step in that direction, don’t you agree?
