Spring cleaning!

Session 4, Day 1
Welcome ladies! So lovely to have new faces and returning dancers in the same workshop. What a great group. The first day is always challenging because everyone is just getting their feet wet. Just know that we’re all on this ride together. So the best thing you can do right now, is to jump right in and sink your teeth into the material. I’ve realized that what so many dancers want from this workshop is more confidence in their practice. The first step to this, I believe, is being able to identify your weaknesses so that you can then overcome them (-let’s all be honest here!). That’s another reason why the beginning is always challenging. We are faced to look at the things that we tend to push away. But meeting fear head on is ultimately what makes us courageous. And remember, to a certain extent, confidence naturally comes with time. So coming to class everyday, and mere presence in class is key to your success…We started off lying on the floor. From an X position, we took either a finger or a toe to lead the rest of the body into a spiral. People tend to do too much in this exercise. Remember to allow the body to relax and melt into the floor, and then we can be clear about which part of the body is active at any given moment. Movement coordination is all about timing. So in every exercise, as dancers, we are constantly tracking our body moving in time. The more articulate and accurate you can be about this, the more awareness you bring to your practice. What often happens is that there is no space for this kind of mind-body awareness because the mind is cluttered with other worries – the ex-boyfriend, the grocery list, the report due at work, etc. So a huge task at hand whenever we’re in dance class, is to free the mind from these extraneous thoughts so that we may focus on connecting the presence of mind with the presence of body…Next time we’ll continue to hash out these concepts, because for some of you it might be a new way of thinking about your physical practice. And we’ll continue to practice traveling patterns across the floor and our center pliés exercise, of course.