How To Keep Jury Duty From Hijacking Your Practice

Hello, everybody. It’s Heather Wayman, director at Belly Dance Geek, and this episode of the More Than Steps podcast is about How to keep jury duty from hijacking your practice.

I got this notice in the mail about two or three weeks ago about jury duty, and it’s the second time that I’ve had that I’ve been called for jury duty in just a little over a year. The last time I actually got impaneled on a trial and it lasted for three days. 

So, my entire first week of the two-week commitment, um, was spent on jury duty and, thankfully at that point for the second week I was off the hook. So, this time, I decided because there was a lot of waiting entailed with this whole thing, I thought I gotta have something to do that will keep me from completely wasting my time sitting and waiting.  Because we get called for jury duty if you’ve ever had it before, you know, and if you haven’t just wait, um, you do a lot of waiting.

You’re already divided into groups. They herd you into this courtroom, and it’s completely full, standing room only.

And you just wait and then you get sent to another place and you wait some more and then you have to go through voir dire, and they ask you a bunch of questions about what your viewpoints are what you do, and all that kind of stuff. And then there’s more waiting.

So, I came up with a plan. And this is what I’m going to implement in case I do actually get called. I will say, that I had been lucky so far. I’ve have been calling in for the last, what..four days and thankfully, knock on wood, I have not been called.  And I’m kind of hoping that I won’t because I have things to do.  Things to do like podcasts and Belly Dance Geek stuff… and practice.

All right.

So, here’s my list of five things that you can do to keep jury duty from hijacking your practice.

• Number one on the list is to map a song for choreography.

All you need is a notebook, a pen or a pencil and your music player and some ear buds. And when I’m map out a piece of music, in a nutshell, I listen to the song and take my musical phrases, the  eight counts and notate any strange four count extra beats. And you know, whatever. And then I’ll go back through and listen again, and listen for the instrumentation. 

And over another time, I might listen to identify the rhythms in the different sections and another time I may use that to notate time codes or time stamps on the different sections of the music.  And I always like to go in, and, um

put my music in Audacity and cut it up into sections that correspond with the sections in my notebook on that choreography piece. 

And then, of course, I go back and I start

notating the shapes that I’ll make on the stage and then lay on top of that the steps and

arm flourishes and the little nuances and things that you hear in the music.

It’s a detailed process that takes a number of steps. But if I’m sitting in a jury, sitting in a courtroom, I’ve got plenty of time to go through a piece of music 15 times and do all of these things. Okay, so that’s number one.

• Listen to music. Just listen.  How many times do you actually just sit and listen to music without moving around without necessarily thinking about what steps you would do or what shapes you would make. Just listen to the music and listen to the instrumentation in the drumline and the rhythms and the call and answer and just all those tiny little things that I… I like to close my eyes when I do this because it helps me, it helps me hear the music better.

When I shut out the distractions, um of sight and things that are going on around me.

So that’s another thing. And you can, of course, dance in your head. While you are listening to this music. I love dancing in my head because I’m fabulous there. Everything goes perfectly. All my steps are placed perfectly. There’s no missed zil strike here. There’s no veil flub there.  Everything’s fabulous when I am dancing in my head, Okay, so you can do that, of course.

• You can practice your Air Zils.

Air Zils are fabulous. You can practice patterns. You can practice counting those patterns either musically before the beat, on the beat. Ah, you can practice your tones just by the amount of pressure that you put on your fingers as you’re playing your Air Zils.  Practice your doums, your teks and your “kas”, and all that sort of thing. 

Ah disclaimer here, though. I’m thinking if I’m practicing Air Zils in the middle of a courtroom, people are probably going to see that and this could go one of two ways. It could spark a conversation with someone that might end up being a student and might be interested in taking a dance class.

Conversely, it could also bring some attention that would prevent me from being impaneled on a jury. Just by virtue of this crazy thing that I was doing. So you could just take that and use that, however you want to or not.

• Okay, number four on the list is ah, Spotify o or Pandora or whatever music app you like to use. This would be a great time to sit and search for new music and make your play lists. If you’re a teacher,  it would be a great time to make new playlist for classes for your students. It’s also a great way to search music for yourself. And, you know, kind of categorize it and get it all together and, an organized place that you can listen to later on when you’re not waiting.

• And then finally number five on the list. And this one might actually be better as long as you have access to WiFi…YouTube. YouTube is a time suck for sure. But when you’re sitting there waiting to see if you’re going to be impaneled on a jury, what do you have more of then than you probably know what to do with?  So, cruise on over to YouTube on your iPad or your phone or your Android or your Google pixel or whatever and search out new and inventive ways to use a veil or a sword or drum solo combos.  Or just whatever you know, go searching along there and find some interesting things to look at.

These are all things that you can do to…I’m using air quotes now” to practice while you’re sitting and waiting to see if you’re going to get impaneled on a jury.

Practice is one of my favorite, favorite things. It’s a treasured thing for me. And a hat tip to my student, Saroya, who coined that term in last year’s live run of How To Build a Sustainable Practice Habit, which incidentally is coming up. We start again with a new run on January 13th 2020. Registration is open right now, and there are still spaces available.

If you have a practice habit that’s kind of floundered and you want to recharge it, this is a great opportunity to get in and have some accountability and some support and great, great concrete steps that you can take to build a habit.  And we are building habits.

Good habits are a lot harder to build than bad habits. Bad habits are easy to build. Good habits are the ones that we want.  And that’s what we’re building in How To Build a Sustainable Practice Habit.  It’s a  way for you, to build a habit that you can continue on with. Even if you have a bad day or an off day, and you don’t have the opportunity to do a full practice, I’m going to teach you

how to make sure that your habit stays consistent, whether that is the same time every day or not necessarily the same time every day.

Any way you can find information about How to Build a Sustainable Practice Habit at BellyDanceGeek.com/habit

And like I said, registration is open now and we would love to have you join us. And we hope that you will.