If you do 360 turns on a step you are NOT creative!
by admin
Filed under Fitness Instructor
I have been teaching a lot of step masterclasses which I love doing. However there was one very worrying trend that I noticed in my step masterclass that caused me to have a bit of a diva moment in one recent class! Read on……
So I am putting my routine together and in the routine was a good old fashioned basic over the step, which I put in as a bit of a break from the other, more complex stuff. Well as I am teaching it and getting the group to go over the routine, I noticed that some of my old “advanced” steppers were doing some sort of 360° turn as they are going over the step.
Now in the big scheme of things with credit crunch, the new coalition government, and the return of Big Brother 48, this may not seem a major thing. But I must admit it really hacked me off, and it is not the first time I have seen it.
This seems to have been a very recent addition to certain presenter’s choreography routines, and I have always wondered why. I mean I would like to think that I am known for my step choreography. I would have to ask you, when is the last time that you saw GOOD (and I mean GOOD) step presenters have a 360° Rudulph Nureyev turn over such a narrow platform. I would bet my rapidly increasing overdraft that the answer is never.
So the diva moment came, when I stopped teaching, told all of my old steppers to not even think of doing that in my class again and if any of the instructors that were in the room encouraged that type of movement in a bid to be creative then they obviously lack creativity to think of other ways to make their routines interesting! Plus it looks rubbish (in my opinion)!
Although I maybe went a bit OTT in my criticism I did mean every word. I was lucky enough to teach A level dance for a year and learnt that there were over 16 ways to change a basic movement, and turning is only one……..ONE! So I do have a real problem when I see classes and masterclasses, where the only creativity is to add a spin, or if we are lucky, a double spin. Whooooooooo! I would also go as far as to say that encouraging these dangerous, unnecessary movements on the step is partly the reason why certain members are choosing pre choreographed alternatives
As you can tell I am passionate about the art of creating freestyle choreography. I just hope that the message will slowly get though that you can be as creative as you want, using the right teaching methods, without risking your knee joint (which is a hinge joint, not a ball and socket joint), and without encouraging your clients to be ballet dancers on step. For those of you that teach step, your challenge is to creative a routine which has no full turns in, and think of other ways to change your choreography. Good luck!
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