Goooood Friday Afternoon, dancers and welcome to a new blog post! As you all know, recital season is basically here and after a solid year without it, what an amazing feeling it is to get back on stage again! As always, recitals come with A LOT of details. You have multiple dance pieces to learn, end of the year recital photoshoots, long tech rehearsals, multiple showtimes and of course, costumes! Now all of the aspects mentioned above are all of equal importance, but today we are going to focus on costumes, because with costumes comes one thing in particular: QUICK CHANGES! That’s right, in this post we are going to be sharing some helpful hacks to help you master the art of the quick change. We’ll go over some quick and surprisingly easy ways to cut your changing time in half, and some rather unique ways to do so. So without further ado, let’s get into it.
Tip #1
Organization. That’s It. That’s The Tweet.
Let’s just straight to the point, organization is yo best friend when it comes to pulling of a seamless quick change! Save yourself some much needed time by organizing your costumes and shoes in the order of your dance performance schedule. This will enable you to go right backstage and be able to pick up each costume and just slip them on, versus having to dig through your bag or having to peek through each garment bag to see which costume is which. So say for instance, if the first dance on your roster is a jazz number, line your jazz costume up first. If your second dance is ballet, line your ballet costume up second, so forth and so on.
This idea is best executed by placing your costumes under your dance bag, lying flat if you can. This will take away the risk of someone moving them or mistaking your costume for theirs on accident (yikes).
Tip #2
Bring In The Pointe Arsenal
If you are a ballet dancer en pointe and you have a pointe number to perform at this years’ recital, allow us to help you get those baby’s on quick! Cut your time to put on your pointe shoes in half by layering them in order of assembly. I mentioned this once during the “What’s In My Dance Bag” IGTV episode and this is a hack that I quite literally live by! To save on assembly time, make sure you place all of your pointe accessories inside your pointe shoes in order of importance. For example, instead of keeping my pointe shoes in one compartment of my bag and my accessories in another, completely separate from each other, I always put my toe pads in my shoes, followed by my big toe tips, followed by toe spacers and anything else I am using at the moment. This way, when you run backstage to change shoes, all you have to do is grab your shoes and that’s it. No need to scramble for your accessories, because they’re already in place. Though it may sound like a small practice to put in place, it can save you so much time!
Tip #3
The Disappearing Act
Now this hack is a game changer. I learned this method from a friend of mine when in one recital, I had a jazz dance and pointe dance, back to back, with only 1:15 to change. In this particular year, my jazz dance required tan tights and naturally, my pointe number required pink tights. From coming off stage after my jazz number to getting backstage for my pointe number, 30 seconds of my 1:15 were scrapped. Still having to go through the rest of my changing process like redoing my hair from a half up do to a bun, change from a flowy dress to a platter tutu with a bun net (yes, a bun net) and change from jazz shoes to pointe shoes, I desperately needed to find a way to get this done and get it done quick. I have never been one to be able to change tights quickly. For some reason, it’s just not a talent that I seem to have. And right about then, I learned the hack that changed my life!
If you find yourself in this same situation, layer one pair of tights over the other. Yep, you heard me. Dance tights are opaque, air tight and thick, therefore you would never know that you have on two pairs of tights, especially two pairs of different colored tights at that! The entire time I was performing my jazz number, you couldn’t even tell that I had pink tights underneath my skin’s tone colored tights. After I took my bow and jazz walked my little self off stage, I ran to the changing area, rolled down one pair of tights and was instantly a quarter of the way through the changing process into my pointe costume. Since that day, this is a hack that I stand by, pass down and highly recommend. It’s honestly a game changer!
We hope these tips were able to help you along as we prepare for this recital season, especially this first recital back to normalcy! We wish you an abundance of love and light, and we’ll see you right back here next week for another recital themed blog post!
Keep dancing!
Lexi
FROM THE TOP! 