Diceolations — A Fun New Practice Tool

Let me tell you, my inner geek girl was pretty excited to see these Diceolations. There’s just something about rolling a handful of dice, and it’s even better when those dice are going to tell you how to dance!

Diceolations is a set of 6 polyhedral dice that can create over 284,000 dance combinations. The set consists of three 6-sided timing dice, two 8-sided isolation dice (feet and chest) and one 10-sided isolation die (hipwork). The dice are color coded, white, black and grey, so that you can roll all six and know which timing is for what isolation.

Diceolations come in a small, sturdy cardboard and metal tin. There’s a bit of tissue wrap to pad them, and a folded-up sheet of instructions that describes how to use them and what the different symbols on the isolation dice mean. The tin is designed to make it easy to put your dice in your dance bag or even your purse and take them with you anywhere. Stuck in line at the Post Office? Whip out your Diceolations and roll up a combo (but maybe skip the footwork).

As an example, the above roll would have me doing a horizontal figure 8 with the hips at my choice of time signature, and a chest circle in 3/4 timing while walking to the left in 3/4 timing. If I wanted to repeat the combo, I’d probably do 8 counts walking to the left with a counter-clockwise chest circle and a front to back 8, then do 8 counts to the right, reversing the direction of my chest and hips. WHEW!

Of course, if that’s overwhelming, you can just do one or two sets of dice, or roll three isolations and leave the timing dice out of it, just working with everything at the same timing. Or start out with one set of dice and add more to ramp up the challenge. There’s so many possibilities!

You may be wondering why there’s no arm dice. I was wondering too, but it quickly made sense to me: arm patterns tend to be pretty personal and can’t easily be distilled down to a symbol on a die. If you’d like to add arms to your random combo, you could either arbitrarily assign yourself an arm pattern… Or take a normal polyhedral die from your local game store and assign an arm pattern to each number, then use one of the timing dice to determine the timing. Alternatively, assign arm positions or poses to each number, roll 2-4 of them, and then roll a timing die to determine how quickly you move from position to position. It could get crazy!

I see a lot of possible uses for these. Use them to spice up your home practice by generating unexpected combinations. If you’ve got a tricky set of four 8 counts in a choreography, try some Diceolations combinations to see if anything sticks. Use them to come up with some crazy layers to teach in class — maybe even bring them to class sometimes, and let your students roll up a combo which you all then have to try to learn together.

Perhaps the most fun would be bringing these to a belly dancer party or a retreat, and coming up with various drinking or wagering games that involve challenging each other to do whatever the dice tell you — of course, please drink responsibly, and maybe just wager M&Ms or pennies!

The only real problem that I have is that the price ($40 regularly, currently on sale for $35) is a little steep for 6 dice. I mean, I understand it, it can’t be cheap to have them custom-imprinted with the symbols, and there’s often a hefty set-up fee for that sort of thing. But I have a feeling the price tag is going to chase away a lot of budget-conscious dancers. Also, I checked in and apparently they are “partially made in the US.” I’m not sure if that means that some parts of the package are made here and some are not, or if like the base dice are manufactured overseas and imprinted here… or the other way around? I don’t blame Kendra for not wanting to divulge the intricacies of how her products are made, as that sort of thing tends to take a lot of legwork and research!

I also wish they came in more exciting colors. I mean, black white and grey do make it easy to tell at a glance what timing goes with what isolation… but my gaming dice bag is full of iridescent, speckled, and glittery dice in shades of blue, green and purple. Maybe someday, if the idea takes off, we can get some limited-edition Diceolations in more fabulous colors?

Over all I’m looking forward to playing with these. It will be a good way to add more variety to my daily practices!

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