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Step2: Prepare your body (or do a reality check)
Now you know how the original moves, and have a taste of how it feels like to move like the original. Before you trace the original seriously, you want to make sure that your body allows it.
If the original performs a high kick, split or deep squat, you might want to check your own flexibility and do appropriate warm-up to avoid injury. Make sure you can take the same posture. Unless you are a contortionist yourself, you probably cannot trace the moves by a circus contortionist.
Step 3: Match your move to the original
Even if they are doing the same move, a beginner and an advanced dancer look different, because they are not moving in the same way. It's not the pattern nor overall similarity. It's the differences in body usage, timing of the motion, attitude and presentation that make the difference. What you think you are doing and how you think your body looks are, very often, not what you are actually doing or how your body really looks.
Right. Too often there is a gap between them. The art of tracing is a method to aid filling the gap.
Simply put, most people don't know how they look. You need to match how you think your body looks and how your body actually looks.
There are a few tools and aids.
(i) Use a large mirror.
Just like you wouldn't do a make up without a mirror, mirror is an indispensable tool for your presentable performance. The feedback is instant.
(ii) Use filming.
This is another effective method to know how you really look. Although mirror is better because of faster feedback, filming can complement the use of mirror. Filming can show you from different angles, and can cover the moments when you cannot look away for the mirror.
While you are watching mirror or filming, pay attention to your own body feel, and how you look. You want to be able to place your body parts exactly where they should be as the original, and you want to register how your body feel when you do that. This process is called body mapping.
You want to feel the locations of your major joints and key body parts on both sides (shoulder, elbow, wrist, fingertips, rib cage, nipple, navel, chin, etc etc, you name it and feel where it is). Then know how you look when you move your body parts and have different feel.
If you can draw a line or curve in the air with any given body part as you want, and if the line or curve in the mirror looks exactly as you intended, you are pretty good at maneuvering your body already. For example, draw your name with your hip. If you (and someone else) can read your name, good. (It looks silly, but you don't have to practice publicly.) And the results will be great.
For this "matching" process, speed kills. You want to be precise. Don't cheat with moving quickly. Break down the motion of the original, and do everything slowly.
Painters practice to draw, so they can draw a shape exactly as they want. Musicians practice to play instrument, so they can play the instrument exactly as they want. And dancers practice to use dancer's instrument, his/her own body, so they can dance exactly as they want.
Tracing is like musicians practice Mozart or John Lennon (or whoever), so they learn how to create music with an instrument of their choice.
(iii) Use coaching
I don't always endorse this method for the beginners. Coaching is more effective on someone with existing skills. Also, rather than listening to the coach, seeing self in a mirror is more believing. But if your coach knows what he/she is doing and can appropriately correct your motion, and if you have a trust in him/her and willing to listen, by all means go ahead, work with a coach.
This entry is somewhat abbreviated version of more detailed explanation for the method. But this "matching what you think you are doing and what you are actually doing" is the core of your tracing skill.
