I’ve thought about this a lot fairly recently, and the best answer I came up with was:
“Something I don’t know yet. Invite me please. Also, pay for my air fares and accommodation.”
Failing that, and assuming your students don’t have any experience yet I’d run with the following ideas:
1. Musical Structure – Sets of 8 beats. Downbeats and Upbeats. Music tends to emphasize the downbeats, especially 1&5.
2. Phrasing – 4 or 6 sets of 8 is typical. Hearing cues leading up to a phrase change. “Big Hit” changes vs “Starting Over Afreash” ones.
3. Breaks – Really part of phrasing, but deserves a separate section to itself. Ideas to mark breaks without freezing.
4. Breaking down Moves – Moves constructed in 2 beat increments. Easier to change a move somewhere to mark music than playing 8 steps ahead.
I think that’s the bare bones of it. After that, or perhaps in a separate workshop I’d look at the actual dancing side of it.
5. Acceleration/Deceleration – Looks better when used together to provide contrast within a move (IMO).
6. Body Isolations – Marking accents individually without affecting the connection.
7. Footwork – Using variations in footwork to pick out musical elements. Also teach how to step so that it looks nice (strictly speaking not musicality, but it will make them look better which is probably why they’re there in the first place).
I’d personally avoid trying to teach people to use different types of move to different types of parts of music. I think that’ll just keep them locked into the more moves = better dancing mentality I’m sure you’d like to avoid.
For the moves that you do use in the workshop, I’d keep them simple and try to show at least a couple of stylistic variations of each to change the look without necessarily making it a new move in it’s own right. I’d do so in a way that emphasizes the part of the workshop I was currently teaching.
There would be hundreds of ways to construct different workshops using just that structure alone of course, and there’s really no reason for me to suggest that way except that it makes sense to me. Hopefully it makes sense to someone else as well
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