Poi Fire Dancing Spinning Performance & Twirling (Hoop Staff Fans Also)

For all you performers looking to improve your skill as a performer — not your technique with the tool itself — here’s a great little perspective on why learning more skills may not be the place you need to focus.

When we perform, we’re in what we like to describe as an “energy bubble” here at Temple of Poi. If you expand the bubble by reaching out the audience, then you’re creating an energetic exchange in which you have a “dialogue” between you.

If, however, you stay on stage cloistered in your own bubble, then you become sort of this objectified thing that audience members are disconnected from.

Neither is right or wrong and they both work.

However, if you want to take the audience on a journey, it can often be easier to do that when you actually create the “dialogue” described above because when you shoot energy at the audience, they have an opportunity to do something with it: absorb it, deflect it, and/or reflect it.

If you think about the tentacle of energy you shot to them like a (friendly and desirable) virus, when they absorb it, that automatically changes your crowds energy and the people around them are likely to be infected with it to some degree also. If they reflect it, then not only are they impacted and infecting others around them, they are transmuting the virus of yummy performance energy back to you such that you’re performance is also changed. Even if they deflect it, they may be deflecting it to someone else who possibly absorbs it.

The more one shoots those tentacles to the audience, the more possibility of this transmutation is possible.

Ergo, if one is shy on stage and inward - which is often coupled with technical spinning - the audience is often left in awe but with little actual opportunity to do anything other than marvel.

We contend that a tech spinner who can also actively direct the tentacles of energy to the audience — weather they dance or not — will have a much more impactful experience on the crowd who will then infect them with more power which will have the performer have more powerful tentacles of energy passed to the audience, which causes more impact on the audience and so on in an upward spiral of positive energy that creates more and more powerful  performances overall.

So if you have the skills but don’t feel like you are getting the sort of response from the crowd you’d like, it might be fun to try to “reach out, reach out and touch someone…” with your energy and see how that changes things for you and them.

Let’s face it — if you want to get repeat business with students you need some degree of believability. Marketing, testimonials and referrals certainly help get people through the door though a bigger factor in retaining students who want to study with you ongoingly is credibility. So, what makes an instructor credible?

First and probably most obvious is the ability to demonstrate the move/pattern/sequence you’re teaching. Though, I am also quite sure there are some things I can teach which I can not actually demonstrate (only because I have actually done this), being able to do the movement (to some degree) certainly helps.

The ability to demonstrate the movement ought not be confused with the ability to speak a step-by-step description — including hand, tool and body movements/positions — to the students. I won’t repeat everything I wrote in this blog entry distinguishing the different skills of technicians and teachers, but I will reiterate the premise: just because you can do a move doesn’t mean you can teach it step-by-step to someone else who can’t pick it up from a demonstration. This, for me, is often the crux of teacher credibility. I remember the first time I saw Zan break something down at FireDrums several years back  I was really impressed because he did so much more than demonstrate it (which is what I had seen most of the time I was at the gathering) and actually explained the steps. In that moment, he was more than just another amazing performer and I hope more artists develop this skill so we can raise the overall quality of instruction in the industry.

Equally important to being able to speak directions is the ability to write the instructions down in a reproducible way so people can refer back to it — potentially with diagrams, tables and charts to aid in learning and expand on the basic movement to the theories it represents.

And then there is feedback. Being able to give the students feedback on what they are doing — both in terms of what they are doing the same as and differently from what you are teaching — is critical to instructor credibility. A video is a cool learning tool, and, when you’re in a classroom, if you don’t get direct feedback on what to change in order to better accomplish the desired goal one of the biggest motivations to take in person instruction disappears.

Now a lot of this points to learning a specific movement. If you’re instructor is teaching in a more theoretical way, I say the same thing applies in that a credible instructor will be able to distinguish their theory, then demonstrate a specific (probably several) example of the use of the theory with the ability to then break down that particular example(s) in detail. To be sure, I believe the best education will touch on both the specific and the theoretical so one can work in both the applied and abstract dimensions to improve their skills.

I share this as part of an ongoing series of articles to assist instructors in developing more skill and credibility as well as aiding students in developing criteria designed to pursue the highest quality, best value instruction available for them.

In flow,
GlitterGirl