.: A New Season and a New Opportunity!

A new season is here, and everywhere groups are awaiting those early shows. Did you as a designer make the right choices?

Have you had enough time to train your students to fulfill the mantra that training and excellence is huge on the judges’ priority list? Are you in the right class? Your head is filled with wondering if someone else is using your music, if you have caught the current “trend” in programming or equipment design. It’s exciting, thrilling and scary.

Maybe 30% of that brilliant vision in your head is recognizable on the floor, and will you ever have a rehearsal where everyone is there at the same time? When do you have time to paint your floor, and will the costumes ever come in? The process is as old as the activity itself and maybe the only consolation is that everyone has “been there” and is supposed to remember how it felt.

Amid rising costs, copyright issues, and inadequate rehearsal facilities, somehow, the kids come through, the show grows, and amazingly, the enthusiasm swells to a momentum that overrides all of the adversities. This ushers us into a bigger and better season than ever before.

New choices must now be made – finish the show, compromise the time allocated to training, or heaven forbid, rewrite parts of the first sketch of the show. Now you begin to deal with judges. As you do this, never lose sight of the fact that 50% of the scoring system belongs to the performers. An investment in their training and refining their techniques will yield greater rewards than anything else.

You never stop reinforcing technique: It takes on a changing focus as it is first learned, then applied to the show vocabulary, then cleaned and refined.

Training begins from the inside and works out: This means that it must first be understood mentally and comprehended by the student and then the training becomes physical when the theory is applied and done.

Cleaning works primarily from the outside in: The work is first observed at a physical level, then corrected, refined and developed to a new level of understanding internally (mentally).

The progression from mental to physical training enables you to begin exploring the emotional aspects which brings performance to life. This can best occur when technique has been mastered, becomes intuitive and allows the performer to “detach” from that focus and truly communicate the meaning of the show through performance.

Teaching Tips

The ability to “visualize” is an important tool for the student. It has been proven in many sports and dance communities that strong focused visualization of the physical effort has many of the same qualities as the actual physical performance of the given effort and can improve performance at a physical level. Visualizing the techniques of the performance can almost serve as a rehearsal if done with proper focus.

Repetition of each exercise is important because it reinforces the techniques the student will need and is the means whereby muscle memory is established. It is the patient patterning process that will make the heightened movement seem natural and beautiful.

If you have adequately implemented this approach into your guard program, then you will be ready to deal with competition and with judges. Here are a few points to remember:

Above all – enjoy every step of the creative and educational process!