Break on through to the other side...

Session 3, Day 6
So Day 6 was quite the break-through class. While going across-the-floor we talked about 100 vs 300 percent in terms of, I guess, energetic output. And while, yes, it is a worthy exercise to do the movement at 300% for the sake of feeling your edge. I encourage you to work at this 300 level all the time. That’s not to say, be careless and throw or push your body past its limitations. But everyone in the class tends toward the side of playing it safe. So right now, I think it’s best to explore the danger zone a bit more. I think we’re all responsible enough for ourselves to not get too carried away. And if I saw someone getting carried away I would definitely step in. But in my opinion, no one is there. I mentioned that I feel like we’re waiting for someone to give us permission to go all out, go 300%. When in actuality, when it comes to really performing and giving it your all, no one other than yourself can open that door. Sometimes it helps, to just accept the fact that you will look like a fool every once in a while. But the more you live through embarrassment like that, the more you realize that it’s not a big deal. And when you can laugh at yourself and pick yourself right on up, you’re actually congratulating yourself for being brave enough to just go for it all. When I was younger, I participated in this “audition” for a dance conference scholarship that took place on stage, in front of about 1,500 people, at the closing event after a week-long dance convention. I danced my heart out. So much that I totally lost my grounded-ness and ended up on all fours in the middle of the combination. I absolutely had no recollection of how it all happened. One minute I’m feelin so good and the next, my nose is inches from the floor. Needless to say, I didn’t get the scholarship. But falling on stage in front of so many people was worth all the compliments I received from my colleagues, the people who have seen me dance over the years, and who know me beyond a 2 minute audition. My point is, accomplishments don’t always come in the form of awards or scholarships. It’s really you that determines whether you’ve met your goals or not. I, as teacher, am nothing more than a friendly, sometimes harsh if need be, reminder of the reality that everything you need in order to be successful is already in you. And remember, time in the studio is for no one else but yourself. So let this place be the one place, if nowhere else, where you can experiment, fall and really test your will.

Sumo

Session 3, Day 5
So we’re past the half-way mark in the workshop. And everyone is making leaps and bounds in their skill level. You may not think that the way you dance is drastically different, but it shows in your openness and your ability to take on new tasks with more and more courage. It really showed today in the Budo exercise where we did the connection exercise in a circle, and worked on finding each other’s center quickly. This is good practice in fully committing to the task and leaving no time for doubt – which is essential when dancing. When we dance we’re constantly calibrating and re-calibrating where our weight is. So we practice a deep awareness of our bodies in relationship to space and other people. When we did our center pliés exercise, I had you imagine yourself as a hug sumo wrestler to try to get you to take up more space and allow yourself to expand width-wise. This image helps to use the support of the space and stretch beyond your kinesphere. If our sense of ourselves is flimsy and narrow, then we in a sense limit the relationship we have with our surroundings…We also continued to drill the choreography we already know, and then we added a few more steps. I had you count out loud while running the routine, and that seemed to help connect the mind and the body a bit more. If, without speaking, your mind seems cluttered with other thoughts unrelated to the choreography, then counting in your head and tracking your body with your eyes, is a way to quiet and focus the mind. It’s amazing how much the mind and body conflict, and it’s as if, the heart of the dance practice, is more of a mental exercise in stilling the mind. It’s a really complex negotiation between the two. And in dance class, we should explore how much of our “thinking” and decision-making we can locate in our felt/physical bodies, instead of in our mind-body that we so often use in every-day interactions. More to come…

Your time to shine

Session 3, Day 4
The usual to begin: warm-up from the floor to standing. When we are lying in our X on the floor and spiraling from the initiation of either our feet or our fingers, remember to let the rest of the body melt and just follow the initiation. Allow yourself to just rest into the movement. We, of course, did our pliés, and this time I would step out to give you a chance to figure out the routine yourself. Everyone was really timid at first, but once you let go of some of the pressure, you realized that your body wasn’t so lost and was able to really shine. All the information is already there. It’s sometimes more about clearing the mind to allow the body memory to emerge. We went on to do the connection exercise and tried it from our partner’s back. It’s amazing how much you can feel without seeing. Sometimes the feeling is so much more powerful because you don’t have the distraction of sight. We get a lot of information from our eyes, and sometimes that information can take your focus away from what you’re working on in your body (while your dancing). So learning to shut off that critical voice and the fixated gaze can really open up your movement. We started working on our combination. It begins with a large spiraling of the right arm and upper torso. The footwork is a variation on triple steps (similar to our across the floor exercises). Now that we’re beginning to take on a lot more movement each day, it is critical for everyone to stay open and positive. Practice, practice, practice too! Once a week is not enough. So if retaining the material from class to class is a challenge, then you have to practice it at home and on your own time. Remind yourself again of the goals you set out to achieve at the beginning of the workshop. And ask yourself what steps you’ve taken in the last few weeks to accomplish those goals.

Head over thoughts

Session 3, Day 3
In this class, we tried to hold on to what we’ve already learned about the lower half of the body, and layer an awareness of the upper half of the body. So we worked on the same exercises (and some new ones) and coordinated the arms and back with our legs and pelvis. After our pliés, we added a simple tendus exercise. The trick to going faster is to keeping the weight down through the heels even in the pointed foot, and releasing the upper thigh and hip. When you close the tendu in first, your weight should be equal on both feet. If you shift your weight too far to one side, on the standing leg, then you get stuck and it’s much harder to change weight when you switch sides. We’ll keep practicing this, and keep adding variations to the tendus exercise. Across the floor, we also added a side traveling pattern. The second half of the step, as we step behind and around the big pizza pie, can be done very squarely – or you can challenge yourself to find the syncopation in the rhythm and really carve out the roundness in the step. The big highlight of the day (for me, at least) was the connection exercise. I’ve done this before in workshops, and it’s really helped to connect the group. It’s also a great tool, to breaking out of your box because it helps to get you out of your head/ego and really value feeling. (The work comes from Akira Hino, Budo master, and I studied some of it from Amy Raymond, former ballet Frankfurt member.) We did the basic connection exercise where we simply try to align our centers and connect with our partner. We will continue to explore some of this work in class, and hopefully you, too, will experience the openness that it offers. Next time, we will start on some choreography as well!

Baby are you down down down down down

Session 3, Day 2
The second session was all about the pelvis. We started off lying on our backs with our knees up. In this position, remember to let your belly and quads rest, allowing the weight of the legs to pour through the feet to the ground. We then dropped our knees to either side and brought our legs back up by rolling the back of the pelvis along the floor and grounding our feet. This is a sequential movement so we’re really trying to articulate the movement of the pelvis and feet separate from the knees. The knees should be the last to arrive, and with little to know effort. Which brings us back to the first point: keep the belly and quads released. This exercise helps us find our deep core muscles as well. As we keep the upper body more or less neutral, we still feel the psoas at work to move the pelvis. After our usual warm-up and stretches, we continued on with our pliés, paying much attention to the single-count/ pliés/élevé portion of the exercise. You can flow through each position so that you don’t get stuck anywhere. And the arms help with the feeling of zipping up through the center of the torso and then gathering and bringing it back down through the center. Sometimes blurring the lines helps to see the big picture. So one thing that might help some of you when trying to learn a combination of movements, is to not get so hung up on the details and just take a crack at your best shot of the overall phrase. Maybe for now, just notice if you work from micro to macro or vice versa. We then went on to our exercises across the floor. And added some legs swings to the mix. Remember to keep the supporting leg rooted into the ground and the leg swinging freely, with the emphasis on the downward motion. All the while, the pelvis is moving on top of that stable leg, albeit quietly so as to not send the whole torso swaying. For next time, we’ll revisit all these exercises and focus on coordinating the arms with the rest of the body. See you soon!

Off to a great start - again!

Session 3, Day 1
So this is the first time we’ve done the workshops back to back. Pretty exciting; keeps everything rolling along. Looks like another great group of women – many new faces and some past attendees. So we started this session with a brief discussion about what our goals are for the workshop. And it seems that across the board, people were interested in having more confidence when they dance, and perhaps not thinking too much. Awesome! I think this is the perfect place to work on those things. Another goal that came up was flexibility. And I stressed that stretching should be about openness. We want it to be almost effortless in the body and work with relaxation, because forcing a stretch often becomes tightening some other muscles to accomplish the “shape”. Try to let go of this idea of “shape”, and don’t compromise alignment for some idea or image of what you think “flexible” is. During this first day, we covered a lot of ground in terms of learning movement and exercises – many of which will be repeated and built upon throughout the course. We did a basic warm-up of stretches. Remember that whenever we are lying on the ground, to allow all your weight to melt into the floor. A bit of laziness is actually helpful here! Don’t over exert yourself by lifting yourself off the floor. Just let the weight of your body fall to the ground and move into the ground as if you were turning over in your bed. We then learned our pliés routine, that we will do every day. During a grand pliés, remember to reach wide, and to the sides with your knees, letting your pelvis simply drop to the floor. Holding yourself up by engaging the quads too much, sometimes creates unnecessary stress on the legs and knees. Also, when rising from the grand, get the heels down as soon as possible. It’s as if there is gum on the bottom of the heels that keep them stuck on the floor. We then learned some traveling exercises across the floor – learning the principles of undercurve and overcurve, and learning that I like keeping the heels down (!), pelvis to the floor, and getting as low low low as possible. We will revisit just about all these things the next time. And explore the pelvis a little bit more. So this is the first time we’ve done the workshops back to back. Pretty exciting; keeps everything rolling along. Looks like another great group of women – many new faces and some past attendees. So we started this session with a brief discussion about what our goals are for the workshop. And it seems that across the board, people were interested in having more confidence when they dance, and perhaps not thinking too much. Awesome! I think this is the perfect place to work on those things. Another goal that came up was flexibility. And I stressed that stretching should be about openness. We want it to be almost effortless in the body and work with relaxation, because forcing a stretch often becomes tightening some other muscles to accomplish the “shape”. Try to let go of this idea of “shape”, and don’t compromise alignment for some idea or image of what you think “flexible” is. During this first day, we covered a lot of ground in terms of learning movement and exercises – many of which will be repeated and built upon throughout the course. We did a basic warm-up of stretches. Remember that whenever we are lying on the ground, to allow all your weight to melt into the floor. A bit of laziness is actually helpful here! Don’t over exert yourself by lifting yourself off the floor. Just let the weight of your body fall to the ground and move into the ground as if you were turning over in your bed. We then learned our pliés routine, that we will do every day. During a grand pliés, remember to reach wide, and to the sides with your knees, letting your pelvis simply drop to the floor. Holding yourself up by engaging the quads too much, sometimes creates unnecessary stress on the legs and knees. Also, when rising from the grand, get the heels down as soon as possible. It’s as if there is gum on the bottom of the heels that keep them stuck on the floor. We then learned some traveling exercises across the floor – learning the principles of undercurve and overcurve, and learning that I like keeping the heels down (!), pelvis to the floor, and getting as low low low as possible. We will revisit just about all these things the next time. And explore the pelvis a little bit more.

It doesn't stop here

Session 2, Day 8
Wow! We made it through the 8 weeks! It was a great session, ladies. For our last day, not too much new material… We spent a lot of time during the end of the class, running the choreography, and experimenting with improvisation. Everyone was really awesome about just jumping into the deep end with the improvising. I really felt, by the end of class, that everyone was beginning to let out their club dance – meaning, people were less afraid about letting loose the way that we do when we’re dancing at a club or in our room alone. Some tips if you get stuck during an improv…connect with another dancer and play off of their movements. Mimicry is great (to a certain extent of course). But go ahead and steal a move here and there. Really you’re just using your environment as inspiration for your own movement, and that’s exactly it! Or if other people are a bit too intimidating, then don’t be afraid to close your eyes every once in a while and move from a more internal place. This is ok too. Improv is great at teaching you about yourself and what you need. You can’t always rely on the choreography to get you through, so you really have to listen to yourself and open yourself up to your surroundings. And when purely new movement isn’t coming to you right away…then, for sure, use the choreography as a departure point. Repeat a move or two and then see where it takes you. …So if you’re not attending the next workshop, I hope you leave this one with some valuable tools and great memories. We’ve come a long way in such a short amount of time. And that’s due to your courage, trust and enthusiasm. So thank you for that. Hope to see you on the dance floor or in the studio again!