On December, 31st, 2019, a new disease called the Novel Corona Virus (COVID-19) rapidly began to rapidly affect people in China. It soon spread all over the world causing mayhem everywhere. Countries began to put their citizens under lockdown, the air space was shut down, and people all over the world began stocking up on groceries in fear of the worst. However, the most important thing that has been affected are people’s daily lives. Since social distancing was made mandatory, activities such as school, work and all forms of communication were shifted online.
It’s absolutely absurd to me to think that one can learn something such as dance online! The thought of dance has always come along with the notion of going to class and physically interacting with my teacher and friends. However, with the Corona Virus barring everyone from leaving their houses, we decided to give online dance lessons a try. With the advance technology prevalent in today’s times, it shouldn’t be that difficult or inconvenient we thought! Well, we were wrong.
From the very first class, we encountered several difficulties that none of us had anticipated. One of the most important tools needed for efficient online communication is a good internet connection. A poor internet connection with multiple participants caused lag in audio, freezing of video etc. Many of us struggled to keep up with what our teacher was saying. The lag in audio made it extremely difficult to keep up with the rhythm. Due to the fact that the video was a mirror image of the person, it was a challenge to revise old dance pieces, let alone learn new ones. The other big challenge was in the platform used to conduct these classes. Very often, the conference call ended before the class actually finished due to certain restrictions of the platform used. This led to disruption and loss of time to set the call up once again.
Because we were facing various problems, we improvised. The lag in audio and video due to a poor internet connection could not be helped much as we are in a lockdown and upgrading is not feasible. However, my teacher set up a digital library containing videos of all the dance pieces that we had learnt thus far. This solved the problem of not being able to follow along with our teacher live due to poor internet connection. It also had much better sound quality. It also was very helpful for those that were unable to participate due to a technical snag. Our teacher asked us to practice individually using the videos from this library. We still conducted the online sessions. However, often, instead of using them for dance practice, we used them to discuss things like the history of dance and its origin, something that is not usually done during a physical class.
Overall, the experience of an online dance class has been a completely new one. We faced several challenges, some of which we efficiently tackled, others, which were not so easy to solve. This just goes to show that although technology is sufficiently advanced, there is still a lot more than can be developed to make doing certain things online easier. As a student who will be going to college very soon, I wish to continue learning dance even there. This however, will have to be done by means of an online class. I hope technology will be developed more to make this easier in the coming years.
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