My Quora answer to: Why I never understand what’s wrong with my dancing? I am sharp, feeling the music, not stiff, shows good emotion while dancing but when I record to have a look at it, it looks so awkward. is it due to less space, camera quality or outfit?”
Video is a flat, 2D image. It will always have less energy and visual appeal than a 3D in-person view will. More important than that, a recorded image will always have less energy than we felt when we were doing it. Our senses fool us, then when we compare our recorded efforts to the incredible performances we see everywhere, we feel disappointed.
Is there an answer, a way for our recorded performance to look more like what we feel it should?
Work in a mindful way on a single element at a time. Let’s consider two elements that are important to most dances: extension and sharpness. Work on them separately. For extension, it’s not enough to say, “Does my arm/leg feel straight?” Instead ask, “Can I feel the energy radiating out of my entire body, with my arm/leg reaching farther than it can!?” For sharpness we want any still frame from a video to look clean, interesting, full of energy. Instead of, “Am I making the shapes I’m supposed to,” we want, “I hit this pose, and I hit that pose.”
Then, once we have high energy and great extension available to us, we have to learn how to modulate it, how to control its external look. Not every song and not every moment in any song wants only high energy. Anything that is always done the same way, even with great energy, can look flat, boring, uninteresting. The human mind and spirit crave variety.
Everything is a spectrum of possibilities. We want to be able to express: hard/soft, sharp/smooth, fast/slow, big/small, high/low, happy/sad, and more. All of those, even the ones that seem low, slow, small energy actually require a great internal reservoir of energy that can be channeled to create the external expression we want in each moment.
P.S. Also, get feedback from teachers or others who you trust and whose dancing you admire. Can you find (or start!) a Facebook or other group where people can post photos/videos for others to give helpful comments?