Beautiful conversations with friends recently around really evaluating my practice. This is such an important practice to constantly self-evaluate how you are living your practice!
Your practice comes first... practice isn't just "practice" (practicing something over and over again through repetition)... practice isn't just repeating steps/sequences/phrases of movement, practise isn't just attending classes (although this is important!); it isn't just performing the same routines/performance sets, over and over again.
Practice is about presence, about consciousness, being truly conscious and present in your creativity, in your evolution... practice is turning inwards, delving deeper and deeper into the layers, into the psyche that underpins creativity... searching for those deeper connections that connect us to our self, and to others, to humanity...
And then there's teaching 'practice'... This comes up time and time again in my development as a NZ Registered Primary Teacher. As professionals, we are required to continually undertake this process to gain (and keep) our certification - in our field it's called the "Spirals of Inquiry" (TKI).
I love the image that the spiral creates in my imagination - yes, it is circular, yes it comes back on it itself, revisits, but is also doesn't - in a spiral, we start on the outer circles and we turn evermore inwards each time we come around the circle. Teaching inquiry, or spirals of inquiry, requires us to become conscious of our actions, to actively observe, reflect, take action, and consciously observe the IMPACTS of those actions for our learners and for their learning. And consciously alter our teaching strategies so that they work better for the individuals that we are teaching.
Spirals of Inquiry is also a beautiful metaphor for consciously inquiring into our own dance practice and in particularly for our embodiment of rhythm. As a practitioner of primarily African dance forms (continental and diaspora), polyrhythm is a feature of almost every dance form I have trained (despite my work tending towards my ancestral home more recently). Polyrhythm in an of itself can be likened to a tartan of music - many threads layered and woven together to make a beautiful whole - one where the colours simultaneously stand on their own and also merge together to become a fluid array of layers. So when applying the spirals of inquiry, I try to find the individual threads in the tapestry; hold that with my voice (singing) while performing the multi-layered gestures (which often embody different threads simultaneously - i.e. the complete tartan). Then I take the voice/rhythm away and perform only the gesture, continuing to let the gesture and my body tell the story of that rhythmic thread. By focusing on different 'threads' and finding their mergence with gesture allows me to find the presence that the gesture gives the music. Appreciating each layer of our practice as one thread in the tartan; and the beautiful colours that weave together to make us the individual we are; and the dancer we are. Dance is so much more than movement! It is physical embodiment of the music. It is showing the story of the music!
Dance is not a fixed entity... it is ever evolving... ever changing...ever spiralling... ever being woven...