I've been trying to work on improving my dance a bit more recently, not the least bit inspired by a friend introducing me to IZ*ONE's amazing choreographies (example 1 example 2), though to be honest I had already been trying to work on this before that even happened.

I have somewhat of an interesting upbringing when it comes to dance movement, as I started with martial arts (notably, tai chi), but also taught myself freehand glowsticking through high school and beyond.  I had brief stints of pursuing liquid dancing (still an interest), gliding (never any good at this), and popping (very much still an influence), and later became acquainted with social dance.

If there's one thing that social dance did for my solo dancing, it was simply to give me an opportunity to practice moving around in general -- and become more confident with my own body movement.  That's something that really just takes time, and as dance was always (still is) a secondary pursuit of mine, I never had that sort of regular movement practice until social dance.

I give all this preface because some of it sets the context for what I'm trying to work through now, which is to actually drill down and learn my freestyle dance forms "more properly".  That's a rather nebulous term, but what I mean is that I'm trying to work on some more fundamental concepts of movement (notably, isolations.....) that I really never practiced before now with serious intent.  Which is a weird thing because I've actually been freestyle dancing on and off for so many years now, yet never actually had anything I could point to in terms of a fundamental basis for my movement.  I just sort of "figured it out" and went along with it as I just did glowsticking sessions by myself.

And to some extent, that IS a lot of how freestyle is developed, but on the other hand, I feel like not having the fundamental vocabulary in place has really limited my development (though I admit that not pursuing it as seriously didn't exactly speed things along either...).  I think if I had stuck with something like popping alone, I think I would have had a better sense of fundamental concepts to work on.  But freehand glowsticking is really nothing more than "dancing using glowsticks" which is just as wide and varied as it sounds.  There are freehanders who focus on tosses and mindgames, freehanders who focus on tutting and isolations, freehanders who focus on traces, and of course those who bring in other dance backgrounds.  This is in large part why freehand glowsticking is so interesting to look at -- because it really isn't a defined style at all.  Glowsticks are simply a prop, not a genre.

As I settle down into a more defined sensibility of movement I find myself now struggling to fuse together the freehand glowsticking movements that I've imprinted into my muscle memory together with the new (hopefully cleaner) style of body movement.  It honestly feels a bit like trying to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time.  I can focus on body isolations and clean movements, but as soon as I try to focus on integrating the sticks into it I feel like I can only focus on what my hands are doing.  And of course that makes perfect sense -- my muscle memory for all of these movement paths doesn't factor in the rest of my body at all.  And it's sort of a big ask to try and formulate full-body movement on the fly that also takes into account these props in an appealing way.

So there's work to be done.  Not to mention, both individual sides that I'm trying to fuse together aren't really super clean to begin with...but I can feel the improvement happening slowly, and that's sort of all I can ask for.