5 Ways to Clean your Dance Group

Experienced dancers always tell newbies that they need to clean their choreography in order to get better, but often forget that people who have never danced before don’t know how to clean themselves. “Cleaning” is just the practice of making sure everyone does the choreography at the same time in the same way. Here are some straightforward methods that my dance teams have used in the past to make sure are choreography is clean:

1. Have each member perform the song by themselves for the rest of the group

This is a trick I learned in color guard. You’d be surprised how much you rely on other teammates for choreography and timing without even realizing it. Have each member perform the song you will be working on at the beginning of rehearsal without the video or other team members (To save time, you can split the group in two and perform in two different rooms so it takes half the time. For example, if you have nine members performing a four minute song, having everyone perform it will take 36 minutes. If you divide into two groups running through it at the same time in different rooms, it will only be 18). This is not necessarily to critique each other, but rather to make sure each member is confident enough in the choreography that they don’t need the video or other members for reference. It will also make sure that members learn the dance before rehearsal. They will know that they have to perform it by themselves and will therefore have to hold themselves accountable.

2. Go through everything count-by-count

In Love Notes, we have a member that walks us through the choreography to make sure we all learned it correctly on our own. We usually go through it in eight count sections and focus on choruses since that’s what we usually do all together. For example, the most common discrepancy is what we do with our hands because that can be hard to see on video. In parts where we have different choreography, we break off into groups based on who does the same thing. While doing this, we also usually walk through our formations (the positions we are in comparison to each other) since you can’t really learn that by yourself- two birds with one stone.

3. Split off into groups and critique each other

This is something else that Love Notes does. We split up into groups of three or four. While each group performs the song, the rest of the team takes notes on things that they notice. After the song is over they share the notes with the performers and then switch so that they can perform and be critiqued.

4. Record yourselves and critique each other

Recording yourself is an amazing way to notice breaks that you wouldn’t necessarily notice while watching live. Have each person choose a buddy to watch in the video. Have them write down anything that looks different from the rest of the group. If each person notices three things and there are nine people in your group, that’s twenty-seven things that have been fixed!

5. Do a run-through at the end of every rehearsal

A run-through can just be going through whatever you practiced that day. If you have enough time, doing a run through of everything you will perform at your next event also really helps. This helps you to remember everything you worked on for your next rehearsal.

Hope this helps! Feel free to reach out to me on Instagram (@shaecosplay) if you have any questions.