Space

They used to say that a great dancer could dance on one floor tile for her entire show, but when you have a larger stage or even a dance floor that gives us a lot more artistic opportunities. And so, today we’re going to talk about three ways to use your space. Those three ways are floor patterns, stage positions, and level changes. Let’s start with floor patterns. A lot of us use the most common patterns like circling the stage, or that side to side tennis match traveling pattern. But there are many other patterns available to us. There’s traveling forward and back, in a v-shape, tracing a figure eight on the stage, zig zags, and serpentine lines, as well as many others. Now, traveling patterns can just be use to give us simple variety. We can just make our dancing different by adding a traveling pattern, but it goes deeper than that. Like our body language, our traveling patterns can create different psychological effects on the audience. That’s because they cause us to advance and retreat from the audience and to face them or to turn away. Now, this is a really rich topic, but that’s more than I can cover here. But I’ve got a great video called the psychology of traveling patterns that goes into a lot more detail.

Our second strategy is to use stage positions. Different positions on the stage can communicate different things to your audience. Now, center stage, the absolutely front and back and side to side center is the strongest and the most balanced position. If you move down stage toward the audience that gets a lot more up close and personal. And because you’re closer, and because you’re whole body can’t fit into their field of vision that effects what the audience can see. They tend to focus more on your face or on small details of your dancing. This can create a very friendly effect because you’re visiting, or it can seem aggressive or even needy. If you move upstage away from the audience then you create a less personal effect. The audience is able to see your whole body in one view, and so that can make your body line and the shapes that you’re creating more noticeable than your personality. This can make you seem cool and reserved, or it can make you seem afraid and vulnerable. Now, the sides and the corner positions also have their own effects but that’s more than we have time to talk about here, but luckily I’ve got a great article called the Psychology of Stage Positions that gets into more detail about each of the positions and also includes some strategies for choosing positions when you’re creating a choreography or improvising.

Now our third strategy is level changes. I think most of us when we think about space focus on using the stage space and forget about the vertical space. So, level changes fall into two categories. One is when you change the height of your head. We usually think of this in terms of bending your knees to lower the height of your head, but that also includes rising onto relevé to raise your level. And some movements also naturally change the height of your head. For example, the big hinging hip circle lowers your head while you do it, as do backbends.

Another way to create a level change is to change the audience’s level of focus. So, instead of you manually making your head higher or lower you might reach up high into your space to cause your audience to focus on the high space. Or you might work with lower movements in the hips and feet to drag their attention lower. That’s a level change too.

Now, level changes in my opinion are some of the yummiest variations. They’re a great way to get a lot of mileage out of a single movement or a combination. Just by playing with levels you can kill a ton of time and still be entrancing. But another nice thing is that level changes are a great way for us to represent the rising and falling of the music, whether that’s the actual notes and tones going up and down, or the energy building or releasing, swelling and subsiding. Plus, level changes are a great option for using space when you don’t have a lot of room to travel. But the trick is to be prepared. Some moves are much easier to incorporate level changes into than others. But thing is, even small level changes are interesting. So, don’t feel like every one has to be huge.

So, how do you apply these three strategies to your dancing? Well, I like to start by brainstorming variations. So, list out or sketch as many space variations as you can think of. Different traveling patterns, different stage positions, different ways to change your level, etc. Then test our your vocabulary. Find out what steps you can travel with comfortably. What moves read the best when you’re up close and personal or more removed from the audience in your stage position? What moves can you comfortably do with level changes? And then once you have a sense of what vocabulary is practical just explore. Play around with as many different combinations and variations and moves as you can. You can watch yourself in the mirror, but it’s better to do that on video if you can. That gives you a better sense of what the audience’s view is of these variations. And as you watch, notice how you respond to each of them, and how that compares to the psychological effects that I’ve outlined for you here and in the resources I mentioned. You might have a different response, and that’s great. You’re an artist and your personal taste is what matters.

And for extra credit, start watching how other dancers use these ideas to use their space in different ways.