My dance room is a place of beauty and a joy forever. Or so I thought until I made the deadly mistake of videoing myself. Wha…? This was nothing short of disastrous. My snake arms looked like they wanted to crash to the floor in a tired heap. My lotus hands looked like I was doing the dishes. My vertical hip slides looked like I was a forgotten kernel of popcorn afloat in a bathtub. And my figure eights… well, they just didn’t look at all. What happened to the past four years of muscle isolation pain, strength and flexibility exercises, and long intense tribal workouts? And that includes the 3-hour Asharah workout that I do very often.
I want my money back! Not that it’ll help me very much after I’ve finished jumping off the tenth floor.

Thankfully, my favorite online group came to my rescue. Apparently others had also felt the same way and there was lots of very sensible advice. Explore different camera angles and lighting, for example. I have six lights in the dance room and each one can make a difference.

Take any two things that seem to need fixing and work on them for a while. Take something that looks good and soak in the fact that it looks good. That of course is a bit of a challenge considering I wasn’t even sure that was me in the video. I’ve experienced the same feeling when I’m on a bad phone line and my voice is echoing back to me and I yell at the idiot with that ridiculous voice to get off the phone.
Well, eventually I did have to come to terms with the fact that it was indeed me in that video and that I didn’t dance as well as the mirror’s been telling me I did. From then on, though, I was able to get on with actually using videos for feedback. For the benefit of anyone else who goes through video shock, if you’ve worked hard with the isolations, the repair and correction you’ll do yields quick results. The snake arms need a lot more lift using the upper arms and can’t just be left to the momentum you’ll get from rotating your shoulders. The lotus hands will look better depending on the distance your hands are held from your body, the height or level you lotus at and the shape of your framing arms if you’re doing this pretty movement above the head. So basically, there’s a lot to consider apart from learning the movement itself and that’s what becomes clear when you see yourself on video. You can also see clumsy transitions and experiment with smoothening them out. As a matter of fact, my theory is that self-videoing would help the most with improving arm work.
Of course, it’s also possible that it just wasn’t me in that video…