Over the last few weeks, I’ve talked here about choreography vs. improv and how to choreograph a pole dance routine. Today I want to go into more detail on how you can use improv to create a pole dance.

What does it mean to improv* a pole dance?

Improvving a pole dance means letting yourself move to the music naturally, without following a predetermined choreography. Being able to improv gives you the freedom to jump up and give a great performance at the drop of a hat.

The trick to successful improv is to stay very centered in your body and your emotions, so that you can move seamlessly with the music. You need to reach a point where you can trust your body to move in certain ways without hesitation.

At its highest levels, improv reaches a point of inward emotional focus in which your concentration is more on your feelings than on your movements. This requires a very high level of physical skill, a level where your movements are so ingrained in your body that they are nearly automatic, thus leaving you to expend your energy on expressing your feelings through the music.

It is good to remember that dance is always about expressing yourself through movement and interpreting music through movement. All pole dancers learn the same set of moves, but it is the ones who can create an emotional response through their dance that truly stand out.

Who can improv?

Anyone can learn to improv. I know this because belly dancing is heavily grounded in improv and, even though I began as a very clutzy, nervous student, I eventually became a very good improvisational belly dancer. The method I used for belly dance is the same one you can use for pole.

Some people naturally take to improv, while others prefer choreography, and both approaches can be wonderfully expressive. Try your hand at both and see which you prefer.

Music, music, music

As with choreographing a pole dance routine, good improv begins with knowing your music. Obviously, you can get up on a whim and dance to any piece of music, regardless of whether you’ve heard it before or not, but to give a good performance, you want to know your music inside and out. You want to get to a point where you can sing every nuance of the song in your head since, if you know what’s coming next, you can know how you want to move to it.

Let Yourself Play

Once you know your music well, start dancing to it. Don’t worry about how it looks or whether your moves are how you want them to be. Just give yourself the emotional permission to move. Play along with the music; don’t judge yourself or analyze. Beautiful improv begins awkwardly; that’s normal.

Let me tell you a story. When I was in grad school, I used to belly dance every Saturday night at a restaurant, giving four 30-minute dances (three on a slow night). Each dance was improvved. This took a lot of rehearsing, which may sound odd since, if it’s improv, what was I rehearsing? But the rehearsing was to let myself get used to moving fluidly with the music.

I would choose several pieces of music that I would dance over the coming weeks. I would listen and listen and listen to them, but I always found that, until I started dancing to them, there was always an extra level of nuance that I missed. At first it would be very clumsy dancing – the moves were done well, but it didn’t quite fit the music. So I would keep at it. Slowly, it would start to come together, and within a couple of weeks, I would find I was comfortable enough with the music that, although every time I danced it, I danced differently, the end result was a good performance.

Of course, life never makes a smooth line. Which means that I also found that, about two weeks prior to a given performance of a new song, it would all fall apart. Badly. What had just started to come together would suddenly disappear entirely. I would forget what was coming next in the music, I would get myself twisted in some weird way that completely ruined my balance or left me in just the wrong spot at the wrong point in the song.

But I never judged. I learned to keep dancing through to the end of the song. I learned to breathe and accept that that’s how that practice went and not to worry about it, and through doing that I learned that that was just my pattern. I always worked on a song, had it start to come together, two weeks before the performance date watched it disintegrate into crap, and then – lo and behold – watched it come together again even stronger.

So that’s why I tell you not to judge yourself. Improv needs to be free, or it can’t take you where you need to go. You will learn a lot about yourself if you let yourself give into your movements, even if you never intend to dance for an audience. Improv will make you braver and it will force you to keep dancing for an entire song, even when you misstep – and that will make you a better dancer.

One quick tip for better improvving

And that’s the quick tip: make yourself dance through an entire song. Don’t stop and start, just keep dancing. When you always begin again, you learn to stop when something strikes you as imperfect. When you force yourself to keep dancing, you learn to go with what you’re doing. Moreover, you will break yourself free of mental constraints on how you “should” be moving, and give yourself the chance to create something truly special.

A simple exercise to improve your improv

This is an exercise I learned from Cassandra Shore, my amazing belly dance instructor. She would assign each student a body part with which to improv. One student might have gotten hips, another arms, another the torso, and so forth. Then she would play music and ask each of us to dance using only that part of our body.

The result of this was that it automatically narrowed your focus. You couldn’t use your whole repertoire; you had to focus on expression to make it interesting. It’s a very intense exercise – one which, I admit, I used to dread and curse. But I’ve since grown to see the use in it.

To apply this exercise to pole, choose something from the list below, put on some music, and dance only with that movement for the entire song (give yourself a break and choose a short piece). When you can’t rely on a large range of moves, you will be forced to make each move more interesting and expressive, and your dancing will improve. Here is the list (feel free to add to it):

• Fireman
• Front and back hooks
• Transitions
• Floor work
• Slides
• Sits
• Inverts (choose only one)

Give it a shot, even if it seems unnatural at first. You may need to incorporate a transition or two just to keep moving between spins, but stay as limited in your moves as you can for the duration of the exercise. Learn to dance each move with feeling, really interpreting the music with each move.

And, most of all, remember never to judge your process for creating dance!

*Have you ever tried to use the word “improv” with a spell-checker? It can drive you insane. Especially if you wish to break with All Things Right and True and use it as a verb – as in, “improvving.” So I thought I’d just let myself go hog wild, grammatically speaking, and totally fuck with the spell-check’s mind.