dance coaching Rourou Ye dance coaching Rourou Ye

MY DANCE TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

The four principals I apply in my dance teaching.

The thought of becoming a great dancer is incredibly cool, yet, it can be pretty intimidating when you actually try to learn it from scratch. Dance pushes you to get out of your comfort zone. It is scary but fantastic! My goal is to guide and encourage students to discover their physical potential and find joy along the process. 

Dance classes should always be playful and stress-free. Getting to know my students is the first and foremost thing I do because I believe it creates a safe environment for my students to discover their potential when connections and trust are built between us. 

My approach to teaching emphasizes: 

Enhancing physical awareness

When a body is in motion, many movements are going on simultaneously. What are your hips doing when you move your legs? What about your abdomen? Is it toned? Many dance learners often ignore those details, and they find themselves frustrated with learning dance phrases. It is vital to build an awareness that you can pay attention to each part of your body. When you are aware, you will be better at what to do with it. 

Create sensation

Dance is an art of movement. When you are moving, what do you feel? When you draw your arm from left to right, what is the sensation your arm is having? Is it sliding, dragging, pulling, pushing? How do you feel differently when you use those verbs? I push students to identify and establish those sensations because dancing is constantly feeling those intense things! If you can’t feel those magical happenings in your body, you are missing the key to becoming a good dancer!

Establish a foundational movement system

When you start your dance journey, your body needs to re-learn how to be a body, one that can move freely. How many different ways can you walk from point A to point B? Besides the ordinary one you do? I’ve assembled a foundational movement system to help any beginner break your ordinary movement pattern and be range-free with your body! This effective training system is the foundation for coordination, body isolation, and muscle control. Just like the primary colors, if you have red, yellow, and blue, you will be able to create all kinds of colors!

Be intellectually physical

I demonstrate each movement comprehensively to help students digest better and keep my eyes on their performance. During the process, it’s essential to identify their challenges and design specific exercises to help them overcome them. It is always my priority to help students intellectually understand the intention of each movement through imagination, physical science. Because I truly believe that a gracefully moving body is an actively thinking body.

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I taught many “uncoordinated“ human beings to dance, and they did shine at the end. And HERE IS WHAT I CONCLUDED

Most people came with the idea that they suck at dancing. If your mind thinks this way, your body will react this way too! But I can't blame you. If you think this way, you probably have been traumatized by some bad experience before. No matter whether it was you at a party, a group dance class, or you were just trying to learn dance from youtube. The truth is if you have never had any experience of dance, you might embarrass yourself unless you are a genius born to dance. You don't suck; you are just normal.

Most people came with the idea that they suck at dancing. If your mind thinks this way, your body will react this way too! But I can't blame you. If you think this way, you probably have been traumatized by some bad experience before. No matter whether it was you at a party, a group dance class, or you were just trying to learn dance from youtube. The truth is if you have never had any experience of dance, you might embarrass yourself unless you are a genius born to dance. You don't suck; you are just normal.

With over 28 years of experience in dance, I am very mindful of always creating a stress-free, confidence-boosting environment for my students and getting their souls and bodies prepared for dancing.

I know that most newbies feel very intimidated by learning movements, as you feel bombarded with coordinating movements from multiple body parts simultaneously. However, this is just because you are new and don't know where to start. Movements are all connected, and a single movement can have many layers.

There are various ways of teaching dance. In a typical dance studio class, you go to a class; the teacher uses the whole lesson to teach a set of choreography. During the process, you are so busy with memorizing the movement sequence, and most of the time you have no clue how to execute each movement correctly. At the end of the lesson, you are asked to dance to the music, and you can barely catch anything. This kind of dance lesson is for professional dancers who already have substantial movement experience.

I very much disagree with this kind of teaching style for people who are just getting started with dance. What you need at this stage is to build a new relationship with your body, the dancing body. This means you need to figure out how your body works on a whole new and sensational level. To speak about incoordination, I believe the first step to overcoming it is to build connections between your mind and body, as well as body parts to body parts. So that they can feel each other and collaborate the best way they can. This is far more valuable than just spending all your energy to learn a set of choreography. No point; you can't learn like this anyways.

I put extra attention on guiding my students to the journey of understanding how each movement is built and discovering how actually your bones, nerves, and muscles contribute to each movement's execution, as well as the sensation you obtain when performing these movements. Watch my videos below to understand what I mean!

To dance is not hard if you started off with a learning trajectory that is mindful, caring, scientific, and efficient. You will be surprised how much your body can express, and you will find yourself in a life filled with joy, freedom and confidence. ❤️

Can't wait to start my dance lesson!

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