Psychology of Dance Workshops
Energy Management for Dancers
Whether you want to learn how to sustain energy during a dance event or transform your life, this workshop will teach you how to manage your energy to improve performance, productivity, happiness, and health. By applying this energy management model used in “corporate athlete” programs, you will learn to manage your energy through sleep, nutrition, exercise, emotional regulation, and a sense of purpose.
Drills and Doughnuts
This workshop is for regular, everyday dancers who have non-dance jobs, families, and occasionally eat doughnuts before heading to dance class. We will learn ways to build strength, stamina, and flexibility, and improve technique through Belly dance drills that can be incorporated into your busy schedule. The drills will also help even out strength differences between the muscles on your right and left sides. While we are practicing the drills, Lisa will teach science-based strategies for maintaining motivation, sustaining habits, and using “cues” in your everyday routine to help these new strategies become second nature.
The FCBD Lead and Follow Relationship
The lead/follow dynamic describes the challenging nonverbal communication that plays out on stage amid nerves, technique idiosyncracies, and egos. When it goes well, the audience is treated to a moving and engaging performance. Join Lisa Allred to explore: the role of the leader (conscientiousness, effective leadership, the role of ego), the role of the follower (attention, support, expecting the unexpected), establishing troupe values to support the lead/follow relationships, and disaster recovery!
Spontaneous Combustion:
Harnessing the Power of Group Improvisation
Groups of dancers performing together create a powerful experience for the audience and for the dancers. Choreography and Group Improv are the common methods for group performances, but what if you are primarily a soloist or you want to dance with friends who are not nearby? In this workshop, Lisa combines her knowledge of group dynamics, her pre-pandemic focus on teaching improvisation with an emphasis on body matching, and her born-of-necessity virtual staging and video editing skills to help you create smoking-hot performances both in person and online.
Kindling: Body Matching for Spontaneity (how to do it and how to teach it)
Igniting: Techniques for Improvisational Dance in a Group (in-person and online)
- including forward and behind leading and using painters’ tape for duets
Burning: Applying Group Dynamics (to ignite your performance)
Flaming: Simple Video Editing Ideas (to achieve your performance goals)
In the first half of this workshop, we will be dancing, and in the second half, I will share my screen to give a presentation with discussion.
Habit Formation and Motivation
The alarm goes off for that “before work practice session,” and you roll over and hit snooze.
You know you will feel great later in the day if you get up and do it. Mastering the new skill you have been practicing will make you feel more confident in dance class. Yet, you just don’t feel like practicing today. In this 1-hour workshop, you will learn why it is so hard to
get moving, as well as short-term and long-term strategies to motivate your behavior
change. We will discuss these strategies in terms of dance practice, but they can be applied
to any area of your life!
Topics Covered:
Why is it so difficult to change?
Habits as short-term strategies for change
Implementation Intentions
Temptation Bundling
Minimum Viable Effort
Habit Stacking
Changing the Default
Motivation through social emotions as a long-term strategy for change
Gratitude, Compassion, Pride
Q and A
What is Watering Down Your WOW?
Whether you want to add more WOW to a performance or to your dance business, this class is for you! First, Lisa will teach you brief (under 10 min) stress-reduction strategies to help you center and focus before your big performance, your Insta Live, or your weekly classes. Next, Lisa will guide you through two simple assessments to help you find the time to implement these strategies. Finally, you will learn evidence-based techniques to form habits and maintain motivation so you can continue the changes you begin during the workshop.
Creating a Welcoming Environment
There are social, ethical, and business reasons to examine how welcoming your dance community (or troupe or studio) is to minority consumers, including people of different races, cultures, and ethnicities; perceived socioeconomic status; sexual orientation and gender identity; disabilities; size; and age. In this workshop, you will learn about hidden bias and ways to counteract it; how to use the stereotype inoculation model and other strategies to welcome diverse people into your community; and concrete strategies for using language and images to encourage diversity.
• Inclusive Language
• Counterstereotyping Imagery
• Evaluate your Space
• Empower Mentors for Underrepresented Groups
• Use Social Media to Amplify Diverse Voices
• Identify People of Underrepresented Groups that You Admire
• Put Systems in Place to Counter Automatic Preferences
Body Matching for Synchronization
Have you ever watched a group of dancers who vary in size and shape yet remain perfectly synchronized? In this workshop, you will learn how to use “body matching” techniques to improve your synchronization, learn dance combos faster and with increased precision, and increase what you learn in class even if you are sitting out with injuries. Is this magic?? No, observation accelerates the learning process because our brains can map others’ actions into our own mental representations, making them more detailed and more accurate. Come prepared for a brief discussion (10 minutes) followed by some fun dance exercises to apply these techniques!
Burnout: Recognizing, Regenerating, and Returning
Burnout is a hot topic right now because over 50% of us are experiencing it. Burnout for dancers and dance teachers might sound like this…“I just don’t have the energy to dance anymore” or “I can’t stand to be on a screen for one more moment.” Join Lisa to learn how to recognize burnout, concrete strategies for recharging through restorative relaxation, and ideas for returning to dance (or work or life) with a different mindset. Take the strategies you will learn and apply them to dance, or to any other aspect of your life!
Are You Ready to Start Teaching Dance?
Whether you are a brand-new teacher or one with some experience, you still might not feel ready to teach. In this workshop, Lisa will help you consider the questions you should ask yourself and the preparation you might need to succeed in the business and interpersonal skills of teaching.
Business Skills
Developing curriculum, finding in-person and/or online space, advertising and recruiting students, being prepared, and being flexible
People Skills
Boundaries, establishing and operationalizing values, adult learning, and how teaching movement is different than teaching other subjects
Finding your Unique Dance Voice
There are lots and lots of dance teachers! Differentiating yourself from the crowd involves much more than how you brand and market yourself (although that is certainly important)! It also includes how you “show up” on stage and in the classroom, how you collaborate and promote other dancers, your philosophy on hospitality, your social media presence, and more! In this workshop, we will begin with a short branding exercise and work together to “flesh out” your unique dance voice.
Communication Skills for On and Off the Stage
Dancers are constantly communicating on the stage. In improvisational dance, our steps are words, our cues are punctuation, and each dancer who leads the group forms sentences. Each sentence spoken by the lead dancer is woven with the next lead dancer's to tell a story for the audience. Even in choreographed dance, the rules of communication are clear while on stage.
Offstage can be a different story... Just like on stage, communicating offstage takes clarity, trust, and courage.
In this class, you will explore your own communication style, learn tools for communicating when conflict is involved, learn tips for having conversations when conflict is involved, and practice what to do if these strategies don't work (e.g., handling REALLY difficult people).
For most of us, having difficult or conflict-prone conversations is not easy. Preparing for conflictual conversations helps ensure they are successful. Handling conflict effectively offstage can positively impact communication and performance onstage, making your class or troupe even more successful.
This is an area where your personal improvement will benefit any group you interact with. This is true because people learn through modeling. Even if you belong to a group where conflict is an issue with multiple group members, when you change yourself, the dynamics of the entire group change as well.