RESPIRO E MOVIMENTO®

DISCOVER YOUR REAL POTENTIAL

DANCE

7 Rules For a Highly Effective Movement Practice

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movements

1. You are a human being before you are a dancer.

Or an “x”, “y”, or fill in the blank with your activity.

2. Fundamentals are not of lowest level, but of highest importance.

In the world of athlete development there is this thing called the performance pyramid which we can use as a guide for how the flow of an athlete’s training life would ideally look like. Life, however, isn’t ideal, and this is especially true in dance.

3. Move honestly.

Honesty… On all levels of life, it is something I am trying to understand. What is truth? Is honesty the same as truth? What is “truth” when it comes to our bodies in motion, and how does it serve us?

4. If you cannot breathe during the movement, you do not own the movement.

Breath is an incredible built-in indicator of what your body is experiencing (making it an excellent tool for moving honestly). Your emotional state and physical health can be interpreted via the quality of your breath, as well as you ability to load and use core musculature to provide dynamic stability and decelerate spinal motion.

5. Slower is better at first- You can’t do it fast until you master it slow.

Until it becomes an unconscious process, movements often need to be practiced very slowly in order gain competence.

The more slowly you move, the more awareness, the more control, and the more honesty you’ll have in the motion.

6. Get out of your comfort zone, don’t be afraid to make mistakes and fail.

Unfortunately for your sense of pride, failure is how we learn and there’s no way around it.

7. Check-in before and after your practice.

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Dance Speaks Truer Than Words

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Dance speaks truer than words

“I hate the written word,” the choreographer Reggie Wilson said with an almost wicked edge, as he sat in his cozy kitchen in Brooklyn, drinking sweet tea on a recent blustery day. Then, acknowledging my confusion, he added, “Now breathe, breathe.”

This remark is doubly surprising, coming from a choreographer who routinely provides reading lists for the audience before his shows — his “Citizen” has its New York premiere on Wednesday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music — and who has been described as a kind of cultural anthropologist working in dance. Mr. Wilson’s creations develop out of personal obsessions that lead to years of reading and research trips before he even sets foot in the studio.

The suggested reading list for “Citizen” includes Valerie Boyd’s biography of Zora Neale Hurston; a monograph on Mother Rebecca Jackson, an itinerant preacher who taught herself how to read through prayer and joined the Shakers; and a study of African-American culture during the Jazz Age, “The Practice of Diaspora.”

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Review: Ballet and Modern Dance Meet, and Ultimately Embrace

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Ballet and Modern Dance

A year or so ago, Ms. Mearns, one of the most acclaimed ballerinas at New York City Ballet, asked Ms. Melnick, a dancer-choreographer long beloved in the experimental realms of downtown dance, to join her for a residency at Jacob’s Pillow. Ms. Mearns’s City Ballet colleagues Jared Angle and Gretchen Smith came along.

The idea was to experiment with process, not to make a piece. And yet a piece did result, “Working in Process/New Bodies,” which had its premiere on Sunday as part of the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series.

What’s most remarkable about it is how seemingly disparate modes coexist and merge without diminishment, how both sides profit from the exchange. In the past, Ms. Melnick has had trouble translating the idiosyncratic magic of her personal style, slippery and supersubtle, onto other bodies. But these new bodies from City Ballet (Ms. Melnick appears in the work only briefly) bring something different, something their own, and Ms. Melnick doesn’t ignore it.

For despite the ballet steps, “Working in Process” isn’t a ballet. Its vocabulary equally encompasses ordinary movement and Ms. Melnick’s signature gestures: the back of a hand pressed to the forehead, a hip raised and lowered with an action that could cock a shotgun. The aesthetic calls for a sensual inwardness without added sauce, opening up a line of beauty already present in the Balanchine aesthetic of City Ballet. The work reveals an overlap between the glamour and drama of Ms. Melnick and those of Ms. Mearns.

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The Kind of Feedback Your Dance Students Really Crave

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Dance Teacher Corrections

A great dance teacher is somebody who not only teaches the student, but inspires the student.

1. Plenty of feedback.

Everyone loves a teacher who gives them lots of corrections.

2. Useful feedback.

The best teachers are not only ones who give lots of corrections, but give corrections relevant to dance as a whole.

3. Something to work on each time.

Going into a combination without a focus point or idea of what we should be working on can be difficult for a student to manage, and our minds tend to drift.

4. The how, not just the what.

If a teacher tells us how to manage a certain step rather than just what the right way is, we can learn from it and we find it easier to apply the correction.

5. Versatile feedback.

If a student is not applying a correction very well, we love it if a teacher will try to say it in a different way and see if that makes sense with the student

6. The opportunity to ask questions.

Especially if the teacher is new or a guest, it’s important to ask us if we have questions about the combination.

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The Connection Between Writing And Dancing

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Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly

“Fred Astaire represents the aristocracy when he dances,” claimed Gene Kelly, in old age, “and I represent the proletariat.” The distinction is immediately satisfying, though it’s a little harder to say why. Tall, thin and elegant, versus muscular and athletic – is that it? There’s the obvious matter of top hat and tails versus T-shirt and slacks. But Fred sometimes wore T-shirts and slacks, and was not actually that tall, he only stood as if he were, and when moving always appeared elevated, to be skimming across whichever surface: the floor, the ceiling, an ice rink, a bandstand. Gene’s centre of gravity was far lower: he bends his knees, he hunkers down. Kelly is grounded, firmly planted, where Astaire is untethered, free-floating.

When I write I feel there’s usually a choice to be made between the grounded and the floating. The ground I am thinking of in this case is language as we meet it in its “commonsense” mode. The language of the television, of the supermarket, of the advert, the newspaper, the government, the daily “public” conversation. Some writers like to walk this ground, recreate it, break bits of it off and use it to their advantage, where others barely recognise its existence. Nabokov – a literal aristocrat as well as an aesthetic one – barely ever put a toe upon it. His language is “literary”, far from what we think of as our shared linguistic home.

Astaire is clearly not an experimental dancer like Twyla Tharp or Pina Bausch, but he is surreal in the sense of surpassing the real. He is transcendent. When he dances a question proposes itself: what if a body moved like this through the world? But it is only a rhetorical, fantastical question, for no bodies move like Astaire, no, we only move like him in our dreams.

But Astaire, when he dances, has nothing to do with hard work (although we know, from biographies, that he worked very hard, behind the scenes). He is “poetry in motion”. His movements are so removed from ours that he sets a limit on our own ambitions. Nobody hopes or expects to dance like Astaire, just as nobody really expects to write like Nabokov.

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7 Things To Remember In Phases Of Uncertainty In Your Dance Life

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1. Life is change

I know that it may seem convenient to think that one day we know who we are, maybe after a certain number of performances we have done or pieces we have choreographed. But it’s – of course – not that easy.

2. Everybody goes through this

You think you are the only person who experiences these insecurities– maybe because you are not good enough? No.

3. Change your perspective

It seems like the moment we are in this insecure state of being we want to get out of it as soon as possible– perceiving this transitional period as something negative. But what if those times are actually the best?

4. Don’t compare yourself to others

Everybody is on a different journey. So don’t compare yourself to others in your class or company. They are where they are and you are where you are.

5. Don’t judge anything

Speaking about not comparing you should also not judge anything – yourself, your feelings, other people. Accept everything and tell yourself it’s okay to feel whatever you feel.

6. Go with the flow

This state won’t last forever. It is just a transitional path that takes your dancing to a new, higher level. Also, life never runs linear. You might have to take three steps back in order to move four steps forward.

7. Don’t take anything too seriously

And finally, do not take the situation or yourself too seriously. Of course we are prone to a sensation of “world weariness” if everything seems to be uncontrollably floating in space.

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