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This is the podcast for us dance teachers balancing our teaching job with other jobs, commitments, and just life in general! We don't need to know how to run the whole studio, work with students 20+ hours a week, or win big at competitions; we just want practical advice and real conversations about how to be the best dance teachers we can be with the little time we have with our students. Join Maia on the casual dance teacher's podcast and in the casual dance teacher's network on Facebook.
Welcome to the Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast. This is your host, Maia. Today we're going to talk about trick steps.
What does that even mean? How should we be doing them in class? Should we even be doing them in class? Let's talk about it. Hello, hello, everyone. Welcome back.
Thanks for joining me again. We're going to get into what could be a little bit of a heated topic, I think, because this is just a hot one in the dance world right now. Trick steps.
Do they really fit in every single genre of dance? Like we often see in pop culture, on social media, around the competition circuit. It seems like everywhere you look, dancers are doing trick steps in a variety of different styles of dance. So it kind of raises the question, what really constitutes a trick step and what really constitutes a classic style of dance like hip hop, ballet, jazz? What differentiates them if we're doing some of the same steps across the board in several different styles? Let's start out by just answering the question, what is a trick step? So you kind of know whether or not and how this episode might apply to you.
When I say the word trick step, the first thing that pops into my mind is something like an aerial or a back talk or back handspring. Some of those acro tricks that you tend to see in a lot of different styles. That doesn't necessarily mean that those are the only trick steps that I'm talking about though.
I think that there are trick steps that are genuinely part of every style of dance. And I define it as really any step that's more about looking flashy or looking a certain way and impressing the audience over incorporating the sort of basic tenants of that technique. So I do think you can definitely have different trick steps depending on what style of dance you teach.
Now, I will say, because with the influence of social media, we tend to see like hyper flexibility, really major acro tricks, those types of trick steps taking front and center in the dance world. If you're an acro teacher, this episode might not apply to you because I realized that that is actually what you're supposed to be teaching in your class. If you're lucky enough to have a great acro program in your dance studio and your students all benefit from that, then that also might change things for you.
So let me talk really briefly about the background that I'm coming from with my situation and experience at the studios that I have taught at. Some studios that I've taught at have had acro programs, but they certainly weren't a requirement. And because I've always taught in a more recreational studio setting, not all of the students that I worked with had any acro training whatsoever.
So as a teacher, I had to be really conscious about what trick steps I wanted to incorporate in my class, whether or not I wanted to even teach trick steps in my class and how the students would be able to handle them with us only having class for one hour a week in each style of dance. So I could not rely on any other teachers, any other classes, any other technique time to build the skills that it would take to teach a trick step. I think that this applies to a lot of casual dance teachers, a lot of teachers in recreational programs.
So that's the lens that I'm looking through for this episode. Let's look at the question real quick. Should we even be teaching trick steps to casual students or recreational students that are only dancing an hour to a couple of hours every week? Is it worth it? Now, if you've listened to my past episodes, you probably know that in some things I might be considered a little bit old fashioned.
I'm a little bit of a purist. I really like to delve into the true formal technique of whatever style I'm teaching. So you might think that I would say trick steps are not even worth touching, but that's actually not my stance.
I think the students are seeing them. They're a huge part of the culture. Students are on social media.
They are seeing sort of inflated versions of the styles of dance that they do most likely. So it's worth bringing that into the classroom and letting it be a teaching moment and letting you control the narrative of what students learn about why you're teaching a trick step in the class or why it doesn't have a place in that class. I also think in a lot of cases, trick steps can incorporate the techniques that we're using.
And in that case, it's totally valid and totally reasonable to bring it into the class, but there's definitely do's and don'ts of how to approach it. So I'm going to start with the don'ts. I always like to start with a negative first, even in a classroom setting, if I'm giving corrections or something like that, I'm going to start with the negative and on a positive or sandwich it together.
So in this case, because I have do's and don'ts, we'll do it in the order of don'ts and do's. So let's start with the don'ts. Number one, don't get influenced by social media or what you happen to see on the stage in a competition setting or anything like that.
You need to stay true to what you're trying to teach the students in your classroom. If you have not listened to my curriculum episode, which is the first episode that I ever published of the podcast, and I've referenced it many times, so I'm sorry to be a broken record, but that is really the foundation that I build all of the rest of my teaching from is that curriculum planning. So if you haven't listened to that, and you don't know what I'm talking about, when I say planning the curriculum, working it into your curriculum, just go back and listen to that very first episode.
It will really help you establish the framework that I'm speaking from. And that is where you can figure out if a trick step does or does not fit into your curriculum for your class. Along those same lines, don't make any trick step the primary focus of your class.
And that refers both to say, just a one hour class period, you don't want to be working the majority of that one hour on a single trick step. And also on a larger scale, a unit, you don't want to be spending a whole unit just working on one or a few trick steps. You want to still stay true to certain goals that are really rooted in the basic technique of what you're teaching.
And trick steps just be one part of that, or sort of a branch of this larger trunk of the tree. While I say that, I also have to say that another don't is don't rush through the process of teaching a trick step. Don't try to only allocate a small amount of time and push.
This is how you do it. You're going to go quick, quick, quick. Without establishing the true technique, the muscle groups, the body awareness, whatever kind of foundational work the students need in order to truly understand and execute that trick step.
Wow. This flows really naturally into the dues. And basically for every don't, there's a dues.
You can probably kind of see what's coming, but this will give me a little bit more time to kind of break down exactly what I'm talking about when it comes to what you should be doing in your classroom. If and when you choose to incorporate trick steps of any kind, the biggest one, and why I talked about going back to the curriculum planning episode and making sure that you're using that system, or at least some kind of organized curriculum system in your classroom is that you do always want to introduce a trick step as one way to enhance the student's understanding of their technique in that style of dance, their understanding of the sort of core concepts of the curriculum that you're trying to work on. I can give you an example here because as a modern dance teacher, it's really easy for me to incorporate certain steps under the overarching concept or lesson of fall and recovery.
That is something that you need to understand as a modern dancer, how your body falls through space and recovers. And something like a cartwheel can be such a helpful aid in helping students understand that concept. They probably already know at least what a cartwheel is, they might be itching to do a cartwheel, but experimenting with cartwheels through the idea of fall and recovery changes the way that the students interact with cartwheels.
It changes the way that they approach cartwheels and it helps them understand what fall and recovery is. So that's a great tool to use in a modern dance class where it's enhancing the student's technique, it's enhancing their understanding of why that is a core concept of modern dance, and it's giving them another step to kind of put in their arsenal of vocabulary that falls under the umbrella of modern dance. So that's a really, really basic concept, but I thought that that was a good example to give you.
Moving on to the next do, again, to counteract the idea of moving too quickly through the introduction of a new trick step is make sure that you integrate all the technique and all of the strength that needs to go into that trick step into the curriculum before you even bring that trick step up, before you even have the students attempt it. If I'm playing off of the idea of a cartwheel, of course my students have to understand what an inversion is, how to even get upside down and stack up their spines in an inverted position. They also need to strengthen their wrists and make sure that they can get their whole hand flat on the floor, take weight in their arms.
They do need core strength. They need to be able to kick their legs straight with pointed feet, and there's tons and tons of work and exercises and warmup and all sorts of things that go into building up to doing an actual cartwheel. So whatever the trick step is, the first question that you need to ask is, what muscle groups do I need to build? What technique do I need to build before I introduce this to the students? And make sure you leave enough room in your curriculum, whether that's several units or just a couple of short class periods, give that time and build those skills before you introduce the trick step.
And the last do, which I have kind of touched upon already, is just make sure that you personally understand why this step is part of your curriculum, why you are introducing it to the class within whatever genre of dance you're teaching. How is it going to benefit your students and how might it influence their understanding of dance? If you don't have answers to those questions, don't teach that step until you do. That obviously goes for everything, but it really seems like trick steps have this hold over the dance community, like we're not serving our students as dance teachers if they don't know how to do some kind of acrobatic skills or some kind of step with this big wow factor that would make a viral video on TikTok or something like that.
And that's not what it's about. So get yourself out of the frame of mind of being influenced by anything other than your training and what's important to teach your students as a dance teacher. I am not going to go into any kind of conversation about choreography today or whether or not or how you should incorporate trick steps into dances for choreography.
However, I'll just mention briefly here that the same rule kind of applies if you are doing choreography. If you want to put a trick step in there because it's something that the students have been working on as part of their understanding of that style of dance, go for it. If you just see a trick step and you go, oh, that would look so cool in my dance, or that would get such a cool impression from the parents or whoever's watching the dance.
You got to really put some thought into it before you move forward with that. Make sure again, you, you have a true intention of why you're doing that before you put a trick step into any combination in the classroom or on a stage setting. With all of that said, I'll just reiterate, don't be too much of a purist that you close yourself off to changes that are happening in the dance world.
Look at how much the dance world has changed just in the last hundred years, let alone like centuries and centuries, but new styles of dance crop up and new approaches to styles of dance crop up and really exciting innovations in our field crop up because people are open to change and they are willing to explore new things. So I wouldn't encourage you to jump on any kind of trends or just follow along because you think you have to follow a trend in order to be a successful dance teacher. However, I would be aware of what's going on.
What are your students consuming? What are they influenced by? What are you influenced by and audiences and how can we actually incorporate that into the classroom? And how can we build really meaningful conversations about how this crossroads of artistry and athleticism that meets in the middle for these trick steps makes us really unique as dancers and gives us this really unique understanding of our bodies and artistry. I don't know if that made a whole lot of sense, but I'm hoping as a whole, you're understanding and have some really good ideas in your arsenal of how you're going to approach teaching new trick steps. For myself personally, I try to do just one trick step really per class and I'll build it into one single unit.
So I have about a four week period in which we're really focusing heavily on that trick step by incorporating it into the building blocks of technique that we've already built and established. And then I will often try to put it into their recital dance as a showcase of what they worked on. I'm sure there are so many different ways to approach this, and you can build in more or less depending on how much time you have, how many students are in your class, what other styles of dance or what kind of backgrounds, even in other things like gymnastics or other sports they're involved in.
But always, always be thinking about what is serving your students best as dancers. That's all I have to say about that topic. I appreciate your sticking with me and enjoying this beautiful music playing from GB mystical.
By now you may know that I always close out my episodes with a quote, and I thought that this one was really fitting. It's a little bit of a longer one, but I just love how it fits in with this topic. This is a quote by Pearl Primus.
I dance not to entertain, but to help people better understand each other. Because through dance, I have experienced the wordless joy of freedom. I seek it more fully now for my people and for all people everywhere.