You've finally stopped counting in your head during floorwork. You can pick up choreography without mirroring the person in front of you. Your teachers are giving you more complex phrases, maybe even asking for your interpretation. Welcome to the intermediate plateau—a deceptively comfortable place where many dancers stall for years.
For this article, "intermediate" describes dancers with 3–5 years of consistent training who can execute complex phrase work, have begun improvisation study, and are transitioning from student to pre-professional identity. The gap between this level and advanced work isn't about more hours in the studio. It's about a fundamental shift in how you relate to technique, creativity, and your own artistic identity.
Here are seven specific skills to help you cross that divide.
1. Refine Your Relationship with Technique
At the beginner level, technique means learning steps. At intermediate, it means executing them correctly. To advance, you need to interrogate them.
Stop asking how to do a movement and start asking why—why this initiation, this timing, this quality? Contemporary dance draws from multiple lineages, and understanding the logic behind different approaches lets you make intelligent choices rather than defaulting to habit.
Concrete next step: If you've been taking beginner ballet for structure, shift to advanced beginner or intermediate ballet where you're challenged to maintain turnout and extension while moving through space. More crucially, add somatic practice: Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, or Body-Mind Centering. These modalities teach you to notice your own movement patterns—essential for any dancer who wants to move beyond imitation.
2. Map Your Contemporary Lineage
Citing Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Twyla Tharp as your influences is like saying you enjoy "all kinds of music." These figures founded modern dance; contemporary practice has fragmented into distinct, often contradictory traditions. You need to know which waters you're swimming in.
Start here:
- Graham technique: Study Lamentation (1930) to understand contraction and release as emotional architecture
- Release technique: Contrast Graham with Trisha Brown's Set and Reset (1983)—spine as neutral conduit rather than dramatic instrument
- Gaga: Experience Ohad Naharin's movement language, where sensation precedes shape
- Contact improvisation: Explore Steve Paxton's work on weight-sharing and spontaneous composition
- Integrated dance: Investigate companies like Candoco, where disability aesthetics expand what technique can mean
Watch strategically. Don't just admire—analyze. What spatial patterns repeat? How do dancers initiate movement? What relationships with gravity, floor, and other bodies define this aesthetic? Then try it on. Your body will tell you which lineages fit.
3. Structure Your Solo Practice
"Practice more" is useless advice. Intermediate dancers need deliberate protocols that build autonomy—the defining skill of advanced work.
Video self-analysis: Record yourself weekly performing the same phrase. Watch without judgment, then with a specific lens (foot articulation, breath timing, eye focus). Notice what changes and what calcifies.
Phrase manipulation: Take a 32-count combination and transform it through specific constraints—reverse the sequence, change the level, double the tempo, perform it as if underwater, as if furious, as if remembering it from decades ago. This builds choreographic thinking.
Improvisation journal: Document 10-minute solo explorations. What images or sensations generated interesting movement? What felt available and what felt blocked? Over months, patterns emerge—your emerging movement vocabulary.
4. Master Floorwork
Contemporary dance happens at every level, yet many intermediates treat floorwork as transitional—something to survive between standing phrases. Advanced dancers inhabit the floor with the same specificity they bring to vertical dancing.
Technical priorities:
- Develop shoulder and hip mobility for safe weight-bearing
- Practice falling as skill, not failure—learning to yield, spiral, and recover
- Work on seamless level changes that don't telegraph preparation
Training suggestion: Take capoeira, breakdancing, or authentic movement classes. Each offers distinct relationships with the floor that contemporary choreography increasingly demands.
5. Build Your Repertory of Self
"Find your style" is paralyzing advice. Instead, build a documented collection of movements that feel genuinely yours—what Deborah Hay calls your "repertory of self."
Movement invention tasks:
- Create a 30-second phrase using only three body parts
- Build movement from a personal memory, abstracted until unrecognizable
- Translate a text you love into pure movement, without mime or illustration
Journaling prompts:
- What movement do you return to when exhausted or uninspired?
- What do you avoid, and what might that avoidance reveal?
- When have you felt most genuinely visible in performance?
This isn't about forcing uniqueness. It's about recognizing what your body already
