Dance technique: what is it exactly? (1)

Little posts by Farahei

A few useful definitions

Dance technique: what exactly is it? (1)

There are two separate juries at Heiva Digital: a "technical" jury and an "artistic" jury. 

What's behind the word "technical"?  We talk a lot about dance "technique". We often say that he or she has "dazzling technique", or "perfect technique". Or an unsatisfactory technique. What are we talking about here?

Technique is generally confused with performance.

So what exactly is dance technique?

And what about performance ?

To help you understand, we'll talk about the "mechanics" of dance steps and the "dexterity" of executing them.

Mechanics: you could say it's the way you execute the step, simply, with your body.

Dexterity: you could say it's the skill with which you execute the step.

You can execute a step perfectly without having exceptional dexterity. The level of dexterity depends on your training.

Also dexterity can depend on the character of each dancer : you can be more or less relaxed, or more or less fiery. (nervous, speedy).

None of the above prevents anyone from dancing. And especially not YOU who are reading this post!

Performance: the performance very notion is more difficult to define. Performance can be understood in many different ways.

Assessing performance is fairly subjective. 

To simplify things, we can say that a performance is something that we find exceptional. Something that dazzles us, that astonishes us in various ways.

To sum up: you could say that dance technique is both knowledge of the mechanics of the steps and a certain level of dexterity. Dexterity corresponds to your personality.  You dance as you are.

Performance: it's a will, a desire to surpass yourself, and sometimes to surpass others.

More on this in the "dance technique" post (2)