Analyze and Improve Your Dancing: The Path of Self Awareness

The decision to attend college or pursue a career as a dancer immediately following high school is a hard one for dancers faced with the choice. With an adolescence spent dedicated to daily dance classes and rehearsals, I struggled over this same decision myself - unable to imagine a life without dance. I decided to follow my passion for dance in college as a dance major and was surprised in my first ballet class when our teacher asked all the dancers to formulate a goal for the semester and keep a daily technique journal. In the fourteen years I had been dancing, a teacher never once asked me in-depth questions, like what I wanted out of dance or what I wanted to improve upon. Never had the idea to keep a journal and after each dance class write my observations, things I needed to improve and ways I had gleaned from that particular class to help me achieve my goals been mentioned.

As dancers, we often use dance as our outlet - a way to take our minds off all our problems. We leave the studio feeling invigorated but not always thinking of everything that went on in class, like "I wonder why I couldn't lift my leg very high in ecarte side? Was it because my hip flexors are weak? Hmm, then maybe I can do some specific exercises to strengthen and stretch my hip flexors to improve this!"

We are often also perfectionists and get frustrated when we cannot lift our leg to the ceiling but by analyzing our movements and body, we can become self-aware and learn new ways to improve and achieve our goals and fix the problems we are so annoyed by in class! Below I have included the college paper I was required to write at the end of the semester in my ballet class that chronicles my progression towards my dance goal that quarter and the analysis required.