Judging

[Musical_Spinner]

Then they will be ignoring the WGI judges directive from Shirlee Whitcomb.

So every time the show is being judged, they absolutely have to be paying attention to that featured performer?

I don't buy that the judges do that every time. I've never heard a tape where the judges consistently talk about our soloists every show, every tape. Maybe if they screw it up, but then again they wouldn't be soloists if that happend.

[coach#1]

But doesn't it make sense to know about the body in relation to dance to provide that safety? Alignment? Posture? Plie? If you don't know about plie-ing out of a leap or while jazz-running you are going to blow out your knee.....find me a conditioning or athletic training book that is going to tell me that.

Ballet is making the unnatural seem natural, sounds dangerous. A certain level of knowledge about dance has to be used, imo. You don't have to be super fantastic, but the stresses on the body for dance can be overwhelming. The dance kinesiology book I've read talks about the pain the body has from dancing and how the site of the pain isn't necessarily the source since our bodies in dance are used so differently than normal life......it's important to know about these things.

What you are talking about here are basic dance/ballet skills. Posture, alignment, plie....those are all skills in BASIC ballet. If as a guard instructor you understand the basic concepts AND how they relate to the body...your kids should not get hurt. If a kids blows out their knee jazz running and they have been given all the correct information as well as explanation and modeling...then they are poorly conditioned. This is a sport....you pretty much have to be in shape for this activity.

[Musical_Spinner]

Yeah, we were talking earlier about qualified dance instruction. Conditioning is good and everyone should do it, but if you just condition and don't have any concept of safety in dance you are going to hurt yourself (notice how professional dancers still get hurt from doing something bad in technique)

Like I said, ballet is making the unnatural look natural, if you don't know the safety of it and practice it, then you have a problem. While conditioning principles apply, there has to be an added knowledge of dance and dance conditioning specifically to assure safety.

It's not good enough to just condition and not have knowledge about dance and dance safety.....hence why I said you have to know about alignment, posture, and what the real use of a plie is. A plie serves a purpose, it's not just a dance move.....

[byline]

Well put Sue!

Who did you used to get to help with dance? I wonder if they're still around.. maybe I can get them. You guards sure did have their heads up high and those toes were pointed!

Gosh, me and names; pretty bad! I know that one year -- I'm thinking it was '91 -- Jean Royce (her last name may be different now) taught the concert number and did a fair bit of choreography. It was a different person every year. The last year I taught, it was one of the girls who had marched in my guard and graduated the year before. She did a really nice job with the choreography . . . but unfortunately, that's the "jealousy" situation I referred to earlier. Some of the more vocal girls in the guard didn't like it, just because she did it. I told 'em, "Tough. I like it, and mine is the opinion that counts."

Edited May 13, 2007 by byline

[byline]

That's exactly how I think it should be done if the original staff or head of the program isn't qualified to teach it. Hopefully the people that did teach it did it safely. If you cleaned it then fantastic, dance is a very hard thing to clean.

We got it readable, anyway. If it was something we couldn't clean, we watered it down. I knew enough about ballet technique to know that even if I couldn't do it well, myself, I could spot bad technique. It's pretty much like spotting bad technique on equipment; someone half-doing it, or doing it wrong, just really stands out. So if I felt that there were serious problems in execution, we just figured out ways to water things down so that everyone could do the movement reasonably well, and do it by following through with good technique.

That's what bugged me about the senior corps I spent some time with. The guard members wanted to do all this neat stuff, but there was no basic technique being taught. It was just, "Do this, now do that, now do this," etc. I got tired of that and finally quit.

Also, I knew enough about dance to know how important warming up and cooling down were. So that was part of every rehearsal. It reached a point where the girls wanted it, so that was good. They were bored with equipment warmups in basic block (we did them, anyway), but they liked doing the dance warmups. Go figure.

The worst problems we experienced with outdoor guard had less to do with bad technique than bad field conditions. It's pretty hard to dance safely when there are potholes all over the field . . . and you can't see them because there's grass growing over them. Fortunately, we never had any major injuries, but I worried more about that than anything. I was just sure one (or more) of the girls was going to have a bad sprain (or worse) falling into one of those holes. I guess we were lucky.