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Coping With Mental Stress As A Dancer

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Coping with mental stress as a dancer

Mental stress and strain can lead to burnout and depression, and it can be a major roadblock in not only a dance career, but in leading a healthy life. Here are a few thoughts on how we, as dancers, can take steps to support our mental health…and that of our fellow dancers.

Resist Negative Thinking

It is part of the human condition for our brain to make up stories. Our psyche connects the dots with the information we have to draw a conclusion for a scenario. How many times have you not been cast, and your brain thinks, “I am not good enough for that role” or, “I shouldn’t be in this company, I don’t fit in?”

Utilize Meditation

Meditation has been proven to reduce stress, improve athletic performance, strengthen the immune system, and lead to faster recovery. It also helps us connect with our physical and mental self through awareness.

Reach Out For Support

As dancers, our mental health is not to be taken lightly. It’s as important as our physical health. If you broke your ankle you would seek medical attention. If you don’t feel like yourself emotionally it could be a sign of a problem, and you don’t have to just suffer silently. There is help available.

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Whose Dance Is It Anyway? The Show That Asks You To Guess The Choreographer

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Unknown pleasures

Unknown pleasures: do we enjoy art more if it’s anonymous?

What kind of value judgments and viewing habits do we bring to the theatre when we are watching a new piece of dance? It’s a question posed by Dance Umbrella and CCN-Ballet de Lorraine in their new, joint production, Unknown Pleasures. By presenting an evening of five new works, whose choreography, design, lighting and music all remain anonymous, they are inviting audiences to look at the stage with their senses rinsed clean of all preconceptions – and all PR.

It’s a bold and engaging experiment, challenging the roles that reputation, context, gender and age play in our evaluation of dance. But much as I enjoyed the novelty of the concept (and the freedom of arriving at the theatre without making any advance preparation)

Photograph by Tristam Kenton.

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Tips On Picking Up Choreography Quickly

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Lesley:
Your answer is Moto Memory or Muscle Memory.  Your memory in choreographed dance depends on your neuromuscular systems to do their work.  Muscle Memory is also dependent on repetition and imagery connections.  A huge thing that helped me when I was a younger dancer in Drill-Team was a technique we named “calling it”.  Try to label each part of the choreography that you are struggling with.  Name the sections something that can provide you with an image in your head so there is a cognitive connection to the actual movement.  As you are dancing you “call it” in your head to help you remember the phrases that come next.

Sherise:

Here are some tips I have given students:
If possible stand towards the front of the class. This way you can see your teacher and not have any distraction in front of you. Sometimes the teacher will show a combination or step first. Watch them do it – don’t try to do the movement along with them. Just watch and take it in. When doing the choreography in groups, mark it when it’s not your turn. If it’s not physically possible to do this, you can do it mentally.
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3 Ways To Find Unique Music For Dance

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Original Music is an Option

You can’t get more original than original music! If you are looking for an original composition for your choreography, you will need to find a composer. The task is not as difficult or unaffordable as you think.

It’s All Relative

If you are looking for something pre-recorded and you have an idea of what you want it to sound like, head over to Spotify. I often ask my choreography students to try this when they get “stuck” on a popular composer. If you create a playlist, Spotify will automatically generate a list of “related songs” right below it. This is a great way to discover new artists in a particular genre.

Licensed for More Than Listening

An important and often overlooked consideration is copyright. Copyright protections cover both the recording of the song, as well as a song itself. If you are creating work in a situation where you will need to get the legal rights to use your musical selection, you may find this is more difficult, or more expensive, than you had imagined.

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Dancing and Empathy – Does dance Training Make You ‘Feel’ More?

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A paper published last month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that dancers, with their finely honed control over their bodies through which they can express emotion, are more sensitive than most in perceiving such emotion in others. Or, as The Washington Post summed it up: dancers are more emotionally sensitive than the rest of us.

The study’s abstract puts it in a somewhat more technical way:

Results showed that motor expertise in affective body movement specifically modulated both behavioural and physiological sensitivity to others’ affective body movement.

One of the researchers was Julia F Christensen, a research fellow in the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit at City University London. She told the Post,

The very cool thing about this study is that the dancers not only recognized the emotions better, but their bodies would also respond more sensitively to the displayed emotional movements. Dancers’ bodies differentiated between different emotions that were expressed in the clips, where the controls didn’t.

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