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.