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!