BFF

Day 5

This class was all about making nice with the floor. The floor is our friend. And what better way to feel this than to get close to the floor and do some floorwork. We did our basic roll across the floor and had our partner follow us and push our bodies down. This allowed us to drop our weight and pelvis to the floor. Sometimes floorwork is counterintuitive for some dancers because we train so much in lifting up off the floor, and strive to jump high. But floorwork requires the exact opposite. We want to melt our bodies into the floor and continuously drop the pelvis. We improvised a little bit on getting up from the floor and moving down to the floor. Remember to roll down on the front of the foot and when getting up, take a big step out and connect the sitz bones to the heels. With floorwork, you also want to activate the meaty part in the legs and in the arms. Meaning when you are rolling on the floor, feel the spirals in the limbs that allow you to rest on the shoulders, forearms, shins and butt, so as to avoid the hard surfaces of the bones. Also, thinking about lateral and horizontal movement instead of vertical, so that we are not using only our quadriceps to move up and down from the floor. We added a little bit to the combination – just two rolls on the floor. We will review these and do a few more turning exercises in the next session. See you then!

Movement in Stillness

Day 4
So last sesh, we talked about balances/extensions/alignment…that sort of thing. One important thing to remember with extensions is to not get caught up in this idea of “getting your leg up”, instead you want to remember to stay grounded all the more. We did some standing exercises with a partner, where our friend patted us down and pulled on our heels. Automatically you can feel how your body must adapt to this different placement in weight. We also did a few minutes of standing meditation in tree pose. In this position, remember to feel the spirals through the legs and arms and to bend the knees and keep the weight in the heels, bringing the belly-button to the spine. We skipped the pliés so that we can spend more time stretching. This was perfect considering the weather was pretty warm out. A few things to remember: keep the knee above the ankle in lunge, and always feel the limbs radiating from the belly-button, even in forward folds – trying to make space in between the joints in the pelvis area (scooping out the belly helps with this as well). After a few across-the-floor exercises, we concentrated the rest of the time reviewing the routine. Great job with helping each other out and working without me to remember the dance. This kind of work is really important to practice in dance, because it requires openness and trust that your body remembers. So good job in thinking without your heads! …So as requested, I’m trying to get a video of the routine up on the blog. However, I’m not that technically proficient with things like this, so if anyone wants to help, then let me know. That would be awesome. Ok until next time…We’re going to get to do some floorwork - woohoo my fave!

Sparkling Eyes and Pelvis

sparkling eyes...
and pelvis...

movin on up!

Day 3

Sorry dancers. I’m totally behind on my blogging. A long long time ago, it seems, we focused on our upper body and our arms. The one image that I found helpful that day was an eyeball on the front of each shoulder. So when we think of our posture, it’s less about pushing our shoulders back, which often causes us to splay open our ribs. Instead this image helps us to think of simply opening our “eyes”, opening the front of the chest. In general, we always want to think of expansiveness, openness, three-dimensionality. And here we’re already multi-tasking…reaching our arms from our back, especially our latissimus dorsi muscles, all the while, still keeping our pelvis and tailbone dropped like how we practiced the previous week. Ugh, yes, I know so much to think about. But luckily the exercises we did across the floor, and the combination/routine we’ve been working on were very much the same as last week. Only this time we brought our attention to our upper half. However, we did do a few arms exercises in center: opening to second and closing to first position, shoulder and arm circles, etc. – that got a few people huffing and puffing! But hopefully the healthy burn made you more aware of some back muscles that you may have neglected in the past. Anyway, this week concluded our sessions that were focused on certain parts of the body and a little bit of functional anatomy. The following session, touches on balances and extensions…meaning lots of stretching! I’ll also try posting pics and hopefully some video soon…

the pelvis

Day 2

So we moved it on down to the pelvis today. We started by looking at some illustrations of the lower body and took some time to appropriate the images to our own bodies. We then revisited the connection exercise and added another similar exercise to our repertoire: we took a partner, got connected, and then one person put their hands on the other’s upper arms, while the other person repeated “Right, Left…”. And then we observed how the connection may take us somewhere. After some warm-up exercises and stretches, pliés and tendus, with our awareness on our pelvis and lower halves, we borrowed the “Right, Left” exercise for our across-the-floor moves. With our partners hands on our hips we took a low, low, low walk forwards then backwards. This allowed us to observe the challenges of moving with a partner and also the mechanics of the pelvis. With all this new info, we tried a few more across-the-floor exercises including variations on a triple step with under and over curves, triple steps with the pelvis in one plane (all in a deep plié) and some leg swings. We got through our first few counts of eight in our choreography, and really got our hips and pelvis movin. Next time, we’ll continue with this movement and add on, and focus more on our arms and back.