WCS practice: process and tools
I believe deliberate practice time with a dedicated partner or a small group of people is one of the best ways of working on your dance.
So I’m always on a look-out for how to make my West Coast Swing practices more productive. This post describes my current practice process and catalogues some tools I’m using and have tried in the past.
How do I practice
Before practice
Picking intentions
It’s important to have intentions as you’re coming into the practice. I have a long list of things that I want to work on – derived from private lessons, feedback I get from people, analyzing videos, etc.
For each practice I pick a small subset of things from that list to focus on during that time. It’s often the case that I have a very similar set of things I work on for several practices in a row as I’m mulling over a concept or playing with getting something into my body
If I don’t form an intentional plan it’s often easy to end up just dancing, which is fun but not what I want out of my practices.
I pick intentions for a given session based on my partner
what they are working on/thinking about/excited about
what they are more proficient in and can give me feedback on
what role I’m practicing during this session
Strive to make the intentions specific (if you want to practice a thing – think through what is a good way to do that)
Example
In a recent practice, with a person who I haven’t practiced with before, I had the following intentions:
Do a session of “calibration”
Something I like doing with new partners is asking them about their experience of dancing with me and what would make it more fun for them.
So the first session is me asking them to be very vocal about their experience as we’re dancing. And figuring out things that feel weird/don’t work.
Play with contrast (slowdown to acceleration) in personal movement and partnership
This intention is a bit vague and under-specified, and so I had more trouble working on it. A better version would include specific ways (movement, techniques) to add contrast
Work on being better at bringing my partner along with me when expressing musical ideas.
I hear and (try to) express many things in the music. As a leader, I want to be able to pre-indicate my choices and encourage my partner to join. So here I asked for feedback on when my partner felt surprised and struggled to join my musical choices.
Practice session flow
My preferred practice style is a 1-1 session with another person where we switch between being a “focus” person and a “support” person.
What I mean by that is that at any given point in time we’re focusing on a specific thing that one person is working on, and the other person is acting in a supporting role – giving feedback, adjusting their connection in a particular way, leading specific things, etc. And then we switch.
On Group practices
I find that by default group practices have too much context switching – you have to keep explaining what you’re working on, etc to new people. And because it’s too annoying to do it in a lot of detail every time – you don’t do that good of a job of it.
There are specific formats/scenarios when I find the group practice helpful though:
spotlight practice
getting a more diverse set of opinions on your dance
trying the same thing across a larger subset of partners and getting feedback from them
So we’d usually meet up, warm up for a few dances, share our intentions for the session. And then get into the cadence of working for about 15 min on the first person’s thing and then 15 min on the other person’s thing.
I like setting timers but treating them as a suggestion that we should switch vs a hard cutoff. This releases you from having to be spending attention on tracking time, while still allowing you flexibility to finish working on a thought/topic in a graceful way.
I like to wrap things up with some just for fun dances.
After the practice
Take notes on realizations and feedback I got during the practice.
Spot-watch some sections of the video if I have specific things I want to check on.
Applying technology to help with your practices
Finding good feedback loops has been one of the biggest drivers of growth in my dance. I think wcs/musicality has the best feedback loops, and wcs/connection has solid ones too. I plan to talk about those in another post. My dance aesthetics is the place I struggled with finding good feedback loops the most and hence is arguably my most under-developed skill. Tools below are some of my attempts to address that.
Record dance practices in full
I like recording my dance practices straight through – it removes the overhead of decision-making on whether to record a particular thing, and it makes it easy to catch things that happen only rarely or things you didn’t know you were looking for.
This seems minor, but there is a lot of overhead in stopping/starting the recording, readjusting the camera/etc.
And there is joy in unexpected discoveries and capturing elusive moments of your dance.
Having a rolling recording going can serve as a foundation for delayed mirror situation that we’ll talk about later.
You should also consider recording your private lessons in full as well
How-to
YouTube live stream
If I have a good internet connection – I use YouTube live stream (with visibility set to Unlisted, so only me and my partner can see it)
This is the easiest way to set things up – it just requires a phone and a good internet connection. I’d start a stream from my phone, and we can view it when needed from my partner’s phone or some other device.
YouTube app is the most straightforward way to start a stream, but you have to have at least 50 subscribers for your channel before you can stream from mobile app.
You can use alternative apps to work around that – I’ve found most luck with https://streamlabs.com/
If you couldn’t make the above work for some reason, I’ve also heard of people using Facebook live-streaming to a private FB group. But I haven’t tried this myself.
Also, one nice side effect of doing this is that you’re not using up the storage space on your phone – YouTube basically gives you unlimited video storage 🤯
When offline
I use Camo to capture a video from my phone to my laptop.
Some newer Android phones support “web camera” mode so you can use them without any special software.
This requires you to bring a laptop along, but affords a similar experience of having a recording rolling through the duration of your practice, with you being able to check in on things when you feel like it.
This does use storage on your laptop, but you can still upload your giant practice video recordings as unlisted youtube videos for free infinite video storage, and easy sharing with your partner.
Use delayed mirror to create a better feedback loop for your dance aesthetics
If you watch the live stream that you just set up above – you’ll see it with a bit of a delay. That turns out to actually have some interesting properties.
You can try a movement – fully focusing on it, and then you can quickly check in on the visual aspects of it a few seconds later.
This loses some immediacy compared with the mirror, but with that loss you buy
focus on the movement and not try to execute and watch at the same time
ability to check in on shapes that are impossible when you’re trying to watch things and do things at the same time
It is one of the better ways to do a feedback loop for visuals of your dancing
Putting the video on a larger screen helps. I’ve also played with using a VR headset for this, but the setup I came up with was too annoying to do every time.
The easiest way to set this up is by using the live-streaming setup described in the section above – you just put the stream on the big screen, and you’re done. The video ends up naturally delayed by a few seconds.
But technically you don’t have to do that – there are specialized tools that would just replay video on a delay without recording it. For example: https://replay-mirror.web.app/
I’d love to hear about how other people structure their practices – what’s your process, and what are some things that you’ve found uniquely helpful?
Appendix
Where to practice
Get a house with a dance floor
Or get friends who have one
Consider spaces you have access to
many friends found good practice locations at their offices
I’ve also done some practices at the community space I’m part of
There are also many publicly accessible dance spots out there, I have a map of some places I’ve found – https://maps.app.goo.gl/SxvHtHy9f99bGy7Y9 (mostly SF and Paris with a few elsewhere)
Gyms would often have studios with wooden floors and mirrors which are great
I eventually ended up getting a 24 Hour Fitness membership just to access their studios (I’ve never used it for actual gym purposes 😅)