Chuck on Dancing

Create a Great Atmosphere

2012-01-28T15:20:00.001-08:00

I’ve been to a lot of different social dances. Some are good, some bad, some fun, some not, some just down right horrible. Whether you want to create a great dance environment, or great work place, or great dance studio, it doesn’t matter, some of the same basic principles apply. The environment that you create is far more important than how good you dance or any technical skills you might have whatever the situation is. People might be attracted in the beginning for the technical, but they’ll only stick around if there is a good environment.

Need for human connection

Everyone has a need for human connection. The Non-Violent Communication group ranks connection as one of the seven needs of a human. Forms of connection account for 5 of Professor Steven Reiss’s 16 basic desires. People will go to extreme lengths to satisfy this need, to the point of sacrificing other needs including romance, happiness, peace, independence, or even their own health. Sadly people even do some classically really bad social mistakes where they’re trying to get more connection only to drive people away.

Some people will say anything just so that they can be part of the group. Even if they don’t believe what they are agreeing with. Even if what they are saying is mean and spiteful and they’re a “nice” person, they say it or agree to it just to fit in.

Bashing others or bashing a common perceived enemy is a common tactic people use. (Gossip can be a form of this.) It kind of works to bond you with someone else in your group, but has some serious draw backs. It probably worked better centuries ago, but we live in a connected world, people eventually hear everything. Actually, it probably didn’t work long ago in small towns either. It also sets up an atmosphere of judging. What if you don’t believe the same things? What if you want to go against the judgment in the rumors? Will you trade your independence / knowledge / happiness to keep your connection with your current group?

Being judgmental

We’ve all know and seen people like this. They’re perhaps too vocal about “I like this…” and “I hate this…” and “This is no good…”. (Perhaps a bit self centered too.) Some people have an opinion about everything, which in itself isn’t bad, but they feel they need to share it with the world. All the time. Again, this creates an air of judging.

Many people’s first reaction to being judged is to be defensive or at least cautious. If dancing is at least part about being expressive, do you think they’ll be more open and expressive in this kind of a situation? Are they going to become great dancers in a studio like that? Or worse, the social dancers that feel they need to correct everything someone is doing. What about just having some fun? Why would anyone in their right mind go into a dance situation like that?

If you’re a dance teacher or a dance student, please, save the corrections for the appropriate venue: lesson time.

The judgment concept is actually much bigger than this. People have judgments going on inside their head all the time. To turn the judgment thought process into a thought process of perception and observation is the main key to get people expressive in their dancing (or anywhere else in their life).

A story: I started my dancing at a studio that was hugely judgmental in attitude. I look bad, I think it was horrible. That poor teacher, he was a total wreck when it came time for him to compete. Anyway, further down my path of discovery and learning about dancing, I took my first acting class. (I’ve taken many more since then.) I was stunned that first time though about how they all behaved. About how much it was about observation and not judgment. Everyone should take some acting classes.

Fairness

We are as people wired for fairness. When things are unfair, we are acutely aware of it. If you’re at a dance (or whatever the situation) try to spend some time with everyone. This is especially important for the leader of a group. One of the main qualities we all consciously or unconsciously attach to leadership is fairness. If you’re running a dance, you own a studio, whatever, don’t spend the entire night dancing with just your partner. Dance with everyone in the room. Systematically, one by one go through everyone in the room and dance with them each once, then lather, rinse, and repeat.

Try not to favor anyone in any of your classes. Even if you think you’re being private and just telling one student that “they’re so talented”, other students will hear. Don’t do it.

If we work together, we can all easily get all of our need for connection fed. We can all be more successful. Working together can be more enjoyable. Create a friendly environment in which the community can grow.

Straight vs Extending

2011-11-25T12:11:00.001-08:00

What do you see when you see a good* ballet dancer? Wait! It’s a trick question. Kind of like one of those black and white pictures (a Rubin vase) that could be a vase if you look at the white parts and a pair of people’s profiles if you look at the black parts of the image. When you look at the limbs of a ballet dancer, do you see the straight lines, or do you see the stretching and extending?

*Note, I said “good” ballet dancer, because this difference of what you see makes a big impact on how you dance and what the final result is. This difference is probably one of the most misunderstood parts of dancing.

(image by Bryan Derksen, Wikimedia Commons license)

Straight is a static description, it’s not moving. There are many ways to create straight lines with the body, but few that are healthy for the joints. Humans are not robots. Without proper training for how to make straight through extending and stretching, the straight lines people produce in their bodies are stiff, awkward, weak, and have a slight tinge feeling of “gosh that looks unhealthy”. Often students will lock their knees, lock their elbows, popup their shoulders, or stick out their hip just to “make a line”.

If we get that same straight line by stretching and extending we get a different look. With the arms, shoulders pull back into the body. (Have you ever had a ballroom instructor or ballet instructor tell you to lower your shoulders? Can you picture the beginning ballet dancer with their shoulders way up by their ears when their arms are up?) With the legs, the hips stay more stabilized underneath the torso instead of popping out the the side or the front. (Have you seen people walk and they have to swing their hips all over the place to just extend their legs? Or that awkward looking hip popped out to the side tendu?)

So, here’s part of the problem. Forcing the lines with out extension is unhealthy for the body. It causes stresses on joints in odd directions that the body can’t support. It’s one of the reasons that it looks “awkward”. Sometimes to the confusion of someone looking at it – “it’s a straight line and that’s nice, but it still looks awkward, but it’s straight, but it’s odd, it kind of looks like what the good dancers are doing, but it’s different…”.

Doing it nicely with extension and stretch is more work. We have a sedentary society and all that sitting and lack of exercise really works to misbalance the muscle groups in the body. To a point that many people just starting out dancing can’t actually get to the true healthy straight line of the arm or leg. Usually the shoulder or the hip socket is too tight to actually straighten the arm or leg with out pulling against it in a healthy position. Then, as a teacher you have to take time to strengthen the right muscles (latissimus dorsi, serratus, psoas, periformis, etc) which, once strengthened, allow the arm or leg to freely straighten. And there plenty of good exercises in yoga, ballet, modern dance, weight lifting, and many other areas to help with that.

There are plenty of groups out there (especially in ballet and ballroom dancing) that just focus on the line and not the healthy extension and stretch, to the point where they are mocked about it. One of the dancers I knew went to a Lindy Hop Swing lesson and the teacher started mocking them about being in Ballroom and that they just do “Lines” and then proceeded to dancing all mockingly “oh, I’m doing a line here, I’m doing a line here.” And then on the other flip side of the coin, I’ve heard one (kind of arrogant) ballroom dancer (big into doing fake unhealthly lines) say that Lindy was for sloppy dancers.

And it’s kind of sad. Two different groups both kind of right (straight lines are good and nice too look at artistically, and straight lines done poorly looks awkward and is unhealthy). But neither of them seeing the full pictures and realizing both are right. Both could learn from each other but both just fighting each other.

So, be open minded. Start to see the full picture. Take some time to just observe dancers. Are they “doing lines” or are they stretching and extending to get to, to reach, to perhaps not quite even get there for their movements? Get on the internets and watch some youtube videos.

Obsessed with Winning

2011-11-23T18:54:00.001-08:00

Are you obsessed with winning? Do you know somebody who is? “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!” is a famous quote from Henry Sanders, a football coach from the 1950’s. Do you love that quote? Or do you feel it exemplifies bad sportsmanship?How does this effect dancing? Does it making your dancing better or worse? Are you obsessed with “looking good”? Is image all that matters?

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic

Understanding the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and motivation is hugely important. Extrinsic rewards are external rewards: winning a competition, looking good, fitting in with other people, it’s about obtaining an outcome that comes from outside the individual. Intrinsic rewards come from inside the person, it’s about enjoyment of the task itself or interest or knowledge or self development.

Psychologists have studied intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation for decades. Some basic stuff comes out of this research. People are motivated for longer amounts of time and end up being more successful in the long run if they have more intrinsic motivation. People who are intrinsicly motivated tend to be happier. As a teacher, if you focus on result based criticism (“That was good”, “That was bad”) you train extrinsic thoughts and students do worse over time. If you focus on effort based criticism (“You worked really hard”, “You need to work harder”) you train intrinsic thoughts and students to better over time.

To learn to dance well, it takes a long time to learn. So, if you’re a savvy ballroom dance teacher and you want your students to dance a long time, you should de-emphasize the results of competitions and applaud the work and effort for preparing for the competition.

But now you’re saying, wait a minute Chuck, that’s not what my dance instructor does, or you’re an instructor thinking, that doesn’t motivate students to buy as many lessons as emphasizing results and image. So here’s the catch 22 – by emphasizing the results students get worse, or just stay the same, but they’re being taught stuff, so the logical conclusion is to take more lessons! Some teachers are just naive and just teach however, some teachers actually know and just teach that way to sell lessons.

One time in a group class I went around the room and asked them all to share some of their motivations for dancing. One by one they all came up with extrinsic motivations: “they want to look good dancing”, “they want to look better physically”, etc. So then I explained to them the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Then I asked them all again to come up with an intrinsic reward, it didn’t even have to be their own reward, they just needed to describe an intrinsic reward that you could get from dancing. Then one by one we went around the room again. And again they all came up with extrinsic rewards. Ooof. It was going to be a difficult time teaching that group.

Measurement

One of the things you think you might get from competition is measurement. If you’re going to do anything in life it’s good to have some metric to measure what you’ve accomplished. That way you can tell if you’re getting better and what you might need to adjust. Unfortunately competitions provide a really horrible measurement for the feedback of your development. A large part of that comes from the huge variation of who you are competing against.

You could go to a competition and there could be 20 people that are all much better than you, and rightfully so if they’ve spent the time and done the work to develop their dancing. You could go to a competition and those 20 other people just haven’t worked on their dancing as much as you. You never know who’s going to show up. Couples break up, good dancers get together with other good dancers. Sometimes there are a whole bunch of couples that have been together for ages and are all very experienced. At any one point in time it might be really easy or really hard to do well in competition.

Some days you could be dancing really great and just make it to the quarter finals. Some days you could make it to the finals and be dancing horribly.

Finding Good Measurement

In the study of flow in sports, the idea comes up of reframing your mental perspective on competition. The idea is that you find a different goal for doing competition than the competition itself. This new goal needs to be something measureable and something that’s completely within yourself. Ideally you choose a goal that is both obtainable, but will also take work to accomplish. Examples of good goals for dancing in a competition might be: just getting the choreography danced; adding laban dynamics to your entire routine and making sure they were all clear in your video; or having something specific for your arms to do all the time.

Separation of Mind and Body

In dancing, our instruments are our bodies. Our subconscious minds have difficulty separating what we do and who we are. Separating internally between how are dancing is and how good a person we are takes some skill. Some people get really mentally beaten-up when they compete. I’ve seen plenty of dancers totally psychologically torn apart by competition. Until you accept that your dancing and how well you move is just a result of knowledge and training. You are going to be however good a dancer you’re going to be at any one point in time. Some people just have had more time or better knowledge and some people have had less. You can control your own effort and learning, but there’s nothing you can do about someone else’s. In that respect competition is almost just total random craziness that just causes drama.

What makes competition good?

So, Chuck, what are you saying here? Competition in dancing just sounds like a bad idea. Why should we compete? There are several aspects of competition that are good. Competition sets goals and deadlines. It could be social. It could be a way to cheer, encourage, help, and praise your fellow competitors.

So, if you go about it for the right reasons. To compete purely against yourself (intrinsic rewards). Help others to realize the same. Dance for others so they might see the courage you have in facing your own personal challenges. Be social, be polite, realize everyone is at their own level that is right for them in that moment.

Winning is not everything. Winning is nothing. Sportsmanship and self development is the real value. Everyone wins when no one focuses on winning.

Rhythm 101

2011-10-30T19:47:00.001-07:00

Some people say they have no rhythm, that they’re rhythmically challenged. And it’s true. They’ve got no rhythm. But have no fear! A better understanding of rhythm is just a few moments away. And with it, something to play with and practice and incorporate into all your dancing. Like many of the things I teach, it’s something that is obvious once you hear it, but not obvious until you hear it.

This is something I knew to do dancing from before I started dancing. I don’t know where I learned it or picked it up. No teacher ever taught me it, and as a teacher myself I didn’t think to teach it. Until one day I read a book about note grouping. I thought “Oh my gosh! I’ve done this forever in my own dancing and never realized to teach it and it’s something some of my students are missing.”

Many people I’ve taught who say they have no rhythm can hear the beat of the music, clap or tap or do what ever perfectly to it. Some of them have near perfect internal metronomes (maybe that’s something that screws them up). And that’s all great, but not really what rhythm is.

They can also all speak fine. What? Why is that important you might ask. Language has an important skill that they’re not applying to their dancing. And many people, especially if they learned dance later in life don’t apply right away to their dancing with out some direction or instruction.

All languages have rhythm. Each language has a different rhythm. It allows us to understand word breaks. It’s why for a language we don’t know we can’t hear the word breaks. And why for a language we do know, we can hear the work breaks even if we can’t understand the words. And it’s why it’s recommended to take dance lessons or listen to the music when you move to a new country so that you can pick up the language faster.

What’s important about language is what needs to be done to your dancing. Not all syllables or in the case of dancing beats (or movements) should be danced the same. English and the romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, etc) have a particular up-down pattern to the syllables. One syllable is accented, then the next not, then the next after that is accented. And this is half way to understanding rhythm.

In dancing (and playing music) we need to group notes together. Grouping them together into groups of 2s or 3s on the lowest level and then grouping those groups into bigger groups. Here’s a super important point – in dancing (or playing music) – we need to increase the intensity or strength of the accent as we go.

Let’s take a look at Cha Cha. On the basic level we have:

1 2 3 4 &

In the Latin dances (Cha Cha, Rumba, etc) we group across the measure boundary to end on the 1. (In the American dances – like Swing – we group staying within the boundary of the measure.) That will give us a very different feeling for the music.

So let’s re-arrange a bit…

2 3 4 & 1

Now let’s group them (into a group of two and a group of three), and increase the intensity and accent of the beats…

2 3 4 & 1

So now we have something very different to dance. We’ve all seen dancers that dance every step the same. Maybe you cringe a bit when you see it (I cringe a bit). Maybe you realize what you’re seeing, maybe you don’t, maybe it just looks wrong, or feels wrong to you. If you’ve listened to computer generated music and it just felt dry, un-alive, un-feeling. Yes, the notes are all there, the playing was all the same though.

This is not just for ballroom or latin dancing. This is important for modern and ballet too. I saw a performance just recently. In this performance there was a section where all the dancers were out on stage doing a sequence of things. And most of them, just were don’t a very even rhythm, except for one. That one was doing this beautifully grouped and accented version of what everyone else was doing. It was beautiful.

Now, all rules in art you should have, you should follow most of the time, and sometimes you should just break them. As one of Wally’s student’s quoted of Wally: “You know all my rules, this is not an exam, go break them, break them all!” (Wally being Walter Laird – that cool dude who wrote the Latin syllabus). Understand note grouping. Use it most of the time – build a rapport with your audience through the music. And then break it and take them on a wonderful intellectual and artistic journey. Entertain, enlighten, and educate all at the same time.

Hip Socket, Hip Socket…

2011-07-10T16:03:00.001-07:00

The hip-socket is probably one of the most important joints to work in the body no matter what activity you are doing. Not just dance, but yoga, or weight lifting, or running, or just simply walking around in everyday life.

In the modern age we has humans sit a lot. Over time sitting shortens and tightens the muscles in the front of the hip socket – the psoas and the hip flexors and at the same time lengths and weakens the muscles across the back of the hip socket – the glutes and hamstrings.

When the muscles get stiff, tight, and misbalanced around the hip socket then some other joint has to take the burden of the stress of any activity you do. Above the hip socket this is the lumbar region of the spine, below the hip it’s the knees. Both of the lumbar region and the knees are not designed for going in lots of different directions to absorb stress so they end up hurting. They are both great indicator joints that there is not enough mobility somewhere else (like the hip socket).

At it’s worst I’ve seen dancers literally punish themselves on the dance floor, suffer through pain as their dancing with very stiff immobile hip sockets and then walk off the floor still keeping the show going and then once they’re off stage limp around.

Having mobility in the hip socket allows for us to adjust to whatever we are doing movement wise. It allows us to have grace in our movement. If we’re dancing with a partner as in ballroom it allows us to adjust to all the small details of coordination in the moment, allowing for a smooth partnership. It allows us adjust our fine timing, to express detail in speed or slowness.

In ballet the fundamental exercises are largely about training the body to move at the hip-socket and stabilize the low back. The plie and the tendu both work toward mobility in the hip-socket.

In weight lifting the squat is considered the corner stone of the weight lifting exercises. It’s proper execution to lower the butt all the way to the ground. “Ass to grass” as the saying goes.

Yoga (if properly taught) is filled with exercises to practice using the hip socket. (If improperly taught it increases mobility in the low back.)

What do you do about it?

For the most part, just moving and bending at the hip socket is all you need to do to improve. Many people do other exercises poorly by not mobilizing the hip socket. Even just basic actions in everyday life you should pay attention to mobilizing the hip socket and not the low back or oddly stressing the knee.

Walking and Running

Pay attention to if your hips are rotating back and forth as you take each step. Extra rotation like this goes right into the low back and can be caused by lack of mobility in the hip socket. When the hip socket is free and easy to move then the hips can remain level and quiet through your movement and the legs will swing freely. If the legs can swing freely then they can also move quicker and easier (for better sports action or quicker, sharper movements in dancing).

Sitting (and standing up from sitting)

Sitting and standing from sitting can actually be a very difficult exercise that really works your core, if done properly. People do one of two things typically to take away from the bend of the hip socket. They either lean back to sit (and use a lot of arms) or lean forward a lot. You want to make just basic sitting into a super great exercise to build your core and improve hip socket mobility? Try this: try to remain upright (with just a slight tilt forward with your upper body) and lower your torso all the way down to the chair and again the same thing going up. Being careful to work to get rid of any excess tilting forward or jerking forward to get going or to land. And also work for no falling in that last inch or two sitting down.

What is Blackpool?

2011-06-03T05:06:00.001-07:00

Blackpool England is home to the world’s largest ballroom dance competition. It’s mentioned in several big movies – Shall We Dance? (Japanese and American versions), Dance With Me. Often when you lookup Blackpool in a travel guide for England the first sentence is usually “Blackpool is the Las Vegas of Europe.” Hardly. If you take away the hookers, the strippers, the neon lights, the huge extravagant hotels and many other things, then maybe you have Blackpool.

The competition happens right downtown at The Winter Gardens at the end of May.

A typical day starts with competition that starts in the afternoon and lasts until midnight or 1am. For the most part, it’s just one or two competitions per day. (There were 300 couples in the Pro Latin competition this year.)

Pretty standard ballroom dance competition rules. In latin a couple dances 5 dances (Cha Cha, Samba, Rumba, Paso Doble and Jive). In standard a couple dances 4 dances (Waltz, Foxtrot, Tango, and Quickstep). Couples who have danced the previous year and have gotten past the first few rounds are exempt from dancing the first round this year. Each round the panel of judges choose roughly half of the couples to go on to the next round.

The final round is roughly 6 couples, semi-final 12 couples, quarter final 24 couples. When it gets the final, then the judges order the couples.

The Empress Ballroom is huge. It’s much longer than it is wide, and much longer than any of the competition floors in America.

Blackpool is northwest of Manchester 1.5hrs by train. It’s easy to fly into Manchester and hop on a train to Blackpool.

Blackpool is kind of a resort down although it’s no Las Vegas. It is a popular destination for hen and stag parties and there are blocks and blocks of bed and breakfasts…

And there are 3 piers which have various amusements, arcades, casinos, and rides…

And to the south, past the last pier along the promenade are a bunch of cool sculptures, including maybe the world’s largest disco ball? (It’s like 20ft across.)

But the real reason to come to Blackpool is the dancing…

Lighten Up

2011-06-02T03:27:00.001-07:00

Dancers take themselves too seriously sometimes. It happens in all dance forms, not just ballroom. It is a bit a hazard of the work. The end result of the art is the body dancing. It takes a lot of mental strength to separate the development and criticism of the art and work from the character of the individual. In painting or writing or sculpture the art becomes some other inanimate object. If it is criticized it’s physically separate from the artist. That doesn’t happen with dance or acting.

Without the separation in the mind, through training and effort, it’s easy to get messed up. To get very sensitive. To get bound to rules and ways things have to be. That provides a bit of mental safety from that it’s just art.

Have you seen “Black Swan”? That’s a documentary! I dated a girl like that once… (LOL)

The healthiest and most successful of dancers develop a detachment. What they do is not who they are. Or at least their value is not only just hinged on their dancing. Many people have the opportunity to have multiple things going on in their lives: work, family, relationships, hobbies. A bigger perspective and balanced view of life can be cultivated. That doesn’t happen with a lot of dancers. It can be such a time consuming thing that that is all they do, it’s where they find relationships, it’s their work, it’s their hobby, it’s everything.

So take a breath. Step back and take a look at the bigger picture of life. Bring more the value of other things to your dance life instead of making it everything. That kind of psycho-ness just drives people away. That competition you’re worrying about isn’t everything. That performance isn’t everything.

Your Dancing is a Result of the Exercises You Do

2011-06-01T03:58:00.001-07:00

It’s pretty simple really. Your dancing is a result of the exercises you do. Practicing the steps or your choreography may not help you at all. Good dancing is a product of good movement. Even the best choreography can be danced poorly – boring, lacking in dynamic change, unhealthy movement, etc. What matters is the quality of how it’s done, what gets added to it from yourself, from the exercises you do, from your personal character, from the body training.

This has been known for a long time in ballet, modern, jazz, African, acting, and any number of other classical forms. Seventy to ninety percent of the classes and training there focuses on basic movement, basic exercises, and less on the final form of choreography or the dialog or whatever. Why is it that so many ballroom classes, teachers, and students still are naïve to this and just practice choreography?

Some people have figured that out obviously. I love a quote from Karen Hardy from an educational video when she was dancing with Bryan Watson: “What you see at the end of the day is not what we’re actually working on in the studio, but it becomes that at the end of the day.”

Here’s a quick mind-map of just a smattering of some of the exercises one could do for Latin…

Choreography 101

2011-04-23T14:00:00.001-07:00

Here it is, pretty simple really: VARIETY. And yet it’s amazing how many people don’t follow this really basic rule of choreography (or writing if you’re writing, or acting a play, or playing music, etc, etc, etc). Simply one of the first things you should do is show a lot of variety.

If you’re doing a formation routine don’t just show me everyone all moving in the same layout across the floor back and forth. You bore me! Show different shapes on the floor, show me lines of people, show me circles, show me intersecting lines, be a sculptor of people on the floor. Make the shapes created in different ways: people all get there at once, people get there one by one, or they come together from two different groups. Be creative about it, have fun with it!

Your audience will create story

It doesn’t have to be all that thought out, it doesn’t have to be smart. It just needs to show variety. Humans have a natural tendency to seek out meaning and will create story in their own minds to try to match whatever you do, even when you’re not even trying to show a story. Sometimes it’s better just to have a random sequence of a whole bunch of different wild strange unrelated movement.

Be methodical

Lists are wonderful for this. You can find tons of lists of all sorts of aspects or parts of dancing. Use it. Be methodical about it. A list of all the ballroom dance positions? Fantastic, make a routine that shows all of them. (That’s a great exercise I had to do for a class once.) A list of the Laban dynamics (wringing, pressing, floating, gliding, slashing, thrusting, dabbing, flicking). Again, fantastic! Layer that on top of your routine of different dance positions. (Also a fantastic exercise I’ve had to do for coaches and I’ve used for training students).

Find lists. Make your own lists. Treasure them. Dance positions, dynamics, partner Interactions, shapes of the body, shapes of movement on the floor, shapes of groups, timings of groups, rhythmical patterns. Get a great book like “Modern Educational Dance” by Valorie-Preston Dunlop which has tons of great lists from Laban.

Great creativity can come from just being methodical.

Show people everything you know

Know all the steps in the syllabus? Great, show me. Know the Laban dynamics, great, show me. Know different types of rumba walks, great, show me. Know different types of turns. Show me ALL of them. Know some acting? Awesome, show me different emotions. Layer as many things as you can on what you do. Make your dancing RICH. Show me all that you’ve learned and all the effort you’ve put into learning dance. Make it look like it costs a million dollars.

Don’t be afraid to incorporate other things you’ve learned. You know modern dance, ballet, african, acting, yoga, pilates, music, whatever. Incorporate the variety you have learned from those into your dancing. Create your own style that is uniquely you.

Refine style later

Start with the variety. If in the end your purpose is to create a certain mood then cut and trim and manipulate after you have the base variety. To create or show a certain mood, to truly show it, you must show the opposite. You can’t show speed without slow – otherwise it is just frantic. You can’t show happiness or sadness without it’s opposite.

This is fundamental to all art

Writing. What kinds of sentences are there? Passive, Active, Interrogative, Imperative, etc. Show them all to me. What types of phrases are there? What kinds of constructs are there? Show them all to me.

Acting. What kinds of feelings are there? What are different reactions to them? What are physical actions that people do?

Shame, Embarrassment, Resilience, Teaching Dance

2011-04-17T15:31:00.001-07:00

How do you feel about your dancing? If you’re a dance teacher, what is the attitude and feeling in your lessons? If you’re a student what’s the attitude and feeling in the lessons you take?

It’s a learning environment. Students (and teachers) are learning to do something differently that what they were doing before. You’re going to do things wrong, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to learn different things to do, you’re going to do things that might be difficult to do. But should you feel embarrassed when you do? Should you feel ashamed when you do? Probably you will at some point.

For some people it will be more extreme for some it will be less. Some teachers will try to over protect their students and some will be just the opposite. Both extremes can be bad for the students if it continues. The best teachers will switch, and soothe when it’s needed and just be direct (which at times can seem kind of harsh) when they need to. Over time we can get to a point of more resilience for the students and more compassion for the teacher (and more compassion for ourselves).

Being direct and honest is a lot different than specifically trying to shame or embarrass someone. If people are specifically trying to shame or embarrass you, don’t just walk, run!!! If you get trapped into the situation of being embarrassed about what you do dance-wise you won’t feel like expressing yourself. And we want more unique individual people out there, not more robots! (the robot apocalypse is already here and it’s us!)

The Steps

Too often the syllabus is taught as a strict set of rules. But it not really. It’s just a guide about levels and order of teaching the steps. “The Technique of Ballroom Dancing” is not the technique of dancing – it’s the technique of teaching dancing. It won’t teach you to express or move more efficiently or move more gracefully. Teaching the syllabus is not teaching how to dance. It’s not teaching dance. It’s just teaching steps.

Vulnerability

Don’t get overly soft. Don’t baby your students, don’t seek out teachers that are overly nice (don’t seek out ones that are overly harsh either). That feeling of vulnerability in learning dance is important. Standing in front of an audience with that kind of vulnerability takes courage.

The teaching cycle of doing things “right” and working to get better. Or even just thinking that there is a “right” way of doing things creates this cycle of shame and avoidance. Dancers become more disconnected from their audience from themselves and their emotions.

When dancers can get out on the floor and show vulnerability, relax their bodies and let their own natural emotions out they can get the best presence on the floor. It can be magnetic, magic, and incredible. When dancers try to do the “right” thing, force their actions and close themselves off, they come of unauthentic, unfriendly.

When people come to see you dance no one ever comes to see people dance “right” or how correct they can do something. People want to see the extra-ordinary not the ordinary. Take chances, express your feelings, take risks, be unique! Do the steps your way.

It’s Really About Community

2011-04-03T15:07:00.001-07:00

People sometimes forget that it’s all about community. Why do people take a dance class? or are part of a group? or part of a dance company? or take lessons? or work a certain job? Is it for the technique? or the teacher? or for the money? or for many other very superficial reasons? For the most part, it’s actually about the community. Community fulfills a basic human need for connection (a health need – sometimes “need” has a bad connotation).

Community is a good thing. Through creating community we create friends, people that can help each other out. The ability to work together as a group to accomplish things that otherwise would not be able to be accomplished alone. Group classes are a form of community – a group of people who all pool their money together to afford lessons. They can also support and encourage each other.

How do you create community? How do you improve the health of a community? How do you grow a community? What things get in the way of a community growing? What things drive people away from the community?

Criticalness

If people come into your community to evaluate it, to see if they “fit-in”, to see if it is right for them, if they feel they are accepted, what will they be looking for? If someone who is new to dance and comes to a social dance and they get met with someone who is not going to just dance with them and have fun and play, but bombards them with criticisms and telling them what they are doing is wrong, how are they going to take that? Are they going to feel accepted into the group?

Maybe perhaps more dancers would be more prudent to take a break from the judgemental attitude and just have fun for a bit. (Maybe it would be healthy for their own dancing as well to allow themselves to be more forgiving of their own dancing. Grow a dancer, not a robot!)

Negativity and Gossip

This can be a double edged sword. In a way you can bond with someone by complaining about a common problem or person, you create a common enemy. Or maybe you are playing some sales line that your teacher told you to say, “well, you don’t want to learn wrong do you?” in some hopes to discredit some other teacher. In the end, these things fail.

Many people see through this. They think, “this group is petty and mean, why should I join them? There are a hundred other groups I could join that don’t have this kind of negativity.” And they run away from that social group or community – rightfully so!

Small Group Thinking

In an interesting study social scientists put mice in different sized colonies and observed their behavior. Something interesting happens when a colony gets bigger than 150. The group gets big enough that not every member has to work hard and contribute to the group – some become noticeably mentally unhealthy.

How would you behave in a small group? Like growing up in a small town? What if you knew everyone would eventually hear exactly the gossip you spoke? (That kind of happens even in large groups!) There’s good reason why most of the religious rules and politeness rules exist and are common across the entire world.

Create and Grow

How can you grow your community? It’s actually pretty simple – people want community in the first place. It’s mostly just being careful not to kill its growth. So go out, be friendly. Ask people questions and learn about them. Make them accepted for who they are and ok for them to feel like they can be themselves. Don’t tell them right away that you hate pink dresses (especially if they’re wearing one at the moment). What’s more valuable to you in the long run? A person’s friendship and support, or if they don’t wear pink dresses?

Everyone hits plateaus

2011-03-19T15:17:00.001-07:00

It happens to everyone at some point, they hit a plateau in their progress. If you haven’t, then either you’re not pushing yourself enough or you just haven’t realized that you’re in the middle of one. Once you’re in one, how do you get out of it? And perhaps more importantly, how do you feel about being in one?

Are you progressing things in your life? Your work, your relationships, your dancing, your fitness? Whatever things you might have in your life…

Recognizing the plateau

Most people actually know already when they’re in a plateau. You must listen to yourself and your feelings. Most people do feel when they get in a plateau about life, but they don’t realize that is what they are feeling. They get angry, frustrated, difficult, bored, disconnected, melancholy, unresponsive, depressed.

Sometimes people ignore these obvious signs of the plateau. It could be because they are distracted by things in their life. More often though people actually use the things in their life as a distraction to avoid the fact that they’re sitting in a plateau.

Sometimes the distraction is external – ever have the dance teacher that told you that you are just in a plateau and your just need to work hard and you will get past it? What if that never happens? I’ve seen plenty of people stick with teachers for ages in a stuck state, just spinning their wheels, working super hard and not progressing.

Getting out of the plateau

As one writer put it, “Ten years of the same one year of experience does not make for ten years of experience.” So it’s important to move out of the plateau and continue to progress.

The primary reason people plateau is simple. It’s lack of knowledge. It’s not knowing how to progress.

The trap of the pretty good

In dance, and in fitness (even business and relationships) there is a lot of misinformation. A lot of mixed benefit things – things that partially work or work pretty good. Plenty of things, techniques that work pretty well or good enough – good enough for people to use them and get results for a few months, but then those methods stop being effective. Even after the methods have stopped working to get progress people continue to use them – boom – plateau reached.

Keep learning

It’s pretty simple really, to get out of the plateau you must learn new things, new methods, new practices, new exercises. You must try new things. Even if they fail (usually a quick tell) it will only have taken a short time instead of the vast time people usually keep trying to do the same thing again and again.

It’s best really to get information from things that are different from what you do but similar. Want to progress your dancing? study yoga, weight lifting, other types of dance, music, gymnastics, martial arts, theater, etc.

Read, take coaching (a good coach shows you the things you are missing more so that just teaches you), watch videos, go to theater, or just simply experiment.

Shoulder Placement

2010-11-28T14:23:00.001-08:00

It’s rare to find people with nice shoulder placement in their bodies in modern society now a days. Most pro ballroom competitors have it, many pro ballet have it, and many modern dancers have it. The average amateur or person on the street does not.

Good shoulder placement allows for a stronger and more confident look on the floor. It allows for easier movement of the arms allowing them to move quicker, easier, and more expressively. And for ballroom allows for much better connection with your partner – less noise and stronger, clearer leads/follows.

Bone Placement / Alignment

For many years early in my dancing I looked at different people with different body types and thought of it as just that. They had different body types, and there was nothing to do about it. But as I’ve learned over the years, it’s not really so static. There is a lot of change to the body and how it holds itself.

Any single bone in the body has multiple muscles pulling on it in different directions. If those muscles are misbalanced in their work and one is tight and it’s opposing muscle is weak the bone eventually gets placed in a location that is “easy” feeling but not efficient for the body to work. The joints around then function with less range of motion and weaker. Over longer periods of time the connective tissue itself can change to adapt to the new position.

There are lots of bones / joints in the body that effect our over all look and function, and it might be easy to look at them and think, “oh it’s just the way someone is shaped.” And it is the way someone is shaped, but with proper muscle training the joints and bones can be moved to a more pleasing or attractive look for the entire body.

Things to observe in people… The natural direction of turn-out in their feet. The shape of their foot – are their toes curved inward (the big toe very common, and sometimes the pinky toe). The shape of the curve of the back (is it a natural S? and note it’s relationship to the intercostal angle – the angle made by the bottom of the breast bone and the two bottoms of the rib cage in front – is that angle a nice 90 degree angle?). The straightness of the legs – bow-legged-ness or knocked-knee-ness. The shape of the spine on the back – is the spinal bones bare to the world or do they sit in a nice valley. Any unusual bumps in the spine.

Many of these things are all just the way we hold our bodies. And they can all be cleaned up and realigned with some simple training. Is it that all the top dancers have a certain body type and that you need a certain body type to be a great dancer? Well, yes, in a way, but it’s not that it’s given to them, most of them have earned it with lots of physical work, whether they were conscience about the muscle training or not, their bodies went through it.

The Shoulder Blade

The shoulder blade should really slide nicely flat against the back of the body. No protruding sides or edges. The shoulder blade itself really isn’t connected to the body with joints. It kind of free-floats, like a weight floating in space and it floats in space by being pulled in all different directions at the same time by different muscles. if the muscles are mis-balanced in strength or just improperly trained then the shoulder blade ends up in the wrong position. Often with many people these days, pulled inward toward the spine and pulled up – which totally restricts the movement of the upper spine and blocks some of the free movement of the arm because the rib cage blocks it in front.

Different muscles pull the shoulder blade in different directions. The trapezius muscles pull the shoulders inward and up. The romboid muscles pull them in toward the spine. The latissimus dorsi (the “lat” muscle) pulls toward the spine and can pull up, just toward the spine or most importantly downward. The serratus muscle connects on the inside edge of the shoulder blade and wraps around the rib cage and can pull the shoulder blade out – away from the spine.

The serratus muscles and the lat muscles are probably the ones weakest in most people and need the most development on average. They will bring the shoulder blades down and out and flatten them against the back for most people. When balanced out it will give someone this nice trapezoidal shape to their upper body (it’ll make you look thinner!). People who did gymnastics or swimming in high school often have this nice shape already because those muscles trained.

When the shoulder blade is properly placed and the muscles around are strengthened the shoulder becomes more stabilized and connected to the core of the body. Force from the center can more effectively be distributed to the arms.

The Scapulo-humeral Joint

The scapulo-humeral joint – the shoulder socket, once the shoulder blade is more stabilized, the scapulo-humeral joint can then be worked to be looser and more mobile. Often this joint is over worked and actually limited in range of motion because it is over worked because the shoulder blade is not stabilized.

If we can stabilize the shoulder blade and allow for freer movement at the scapulo-humeral joint then we get nicer arm positions in ballet, and nicer, easier, and thus quicker movement for all our dancing.

Weight Lifting

By far this is one of the fastest ways I’ve seen to train people to get the shoulder blades into proper position. Significant progress can be made in a simple 3 work out a week (for about 1/2 hour) for 6 to 8 weeks that will have a long lasting effect.

Basic work-out: 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps of horizontal push and pull and vertical push and pull. Horizontal pull: rowing actions, rowing machines, etc – works the romboids and the middle range of the lat muscle. Horizontal push: a bench press, push-ups – works the pulling of the shoulders forward with the pectorals in the front and the serratus. Vertical pull: a pull-up, lat pull down machines – works the lat muscle pulling down. Vertical push: a military press, shoulder shrugs – works the trapezius.

Focus on technique: get aware of the muscles you want to train – it does no good to go on the lat pull down machine and use your biceps and triceps to pull with. Focus on the larger muscles around the shoulder blade first. Then in time work to balance effort along the entire chain of muscles of the arm – all the way from the spine to the hand.

Ballet

Ballet class or any other formal training type of dance, if the teacher is knowledgeable, can be a great way to get the proper placement and movement in the arms. I find this usually takes longer to get to the right placement of the shoulder blade (often 2 to 3 years of class 2 to 3 times a week) (but keep in mind you’re learning lots of other really good stuff at the same time too).

Being Sold

2010-11-20T12:44:00.001-08:00

Do you think that your teacher is “the one”? Has he (or she) convinced you to only take lessons from them? That they have the only RIGHT way to teach dance? Ballroom dancing in America (more so than Europe) has a long history of being part of the hard sell. To the point where it is even considered on the same level as used car salesman.

Now I know you’re thinking, I’m not gullible. I’m not easily manipulated. Social psychology professor Robert Cialdini has done a lot of research into this topic (and has a great book: The Psychology of Influence). Part of his research involved being a used car salesman, a door to door encyclopedia salesman, a waiter, and yes, even a ballroom dance instructor. (His book is required reading for most Marketing majors.)

So, what do you think… out of someone who has a strong will, someone who has an average will and someone who is weak willed, which one of them is most manipulatable? Most people say it’s the weak willed one. But the actual studies point to the fact that it’s the average person that is more manipulatable. (Partially because they think they’re not vulnerable.)

Things people fall for

Or perhaps “things I’ve fallen for”

Or perhaps “things you can use to get more students”

Teachers with a heavy sense of “Right” and “Wrong”. Some teachers will fill their lessons with “always do this” and “never do that” and “this is right” and “that is wrong”. The simple advice is this: don’t walk away from those teachers, RUN! That style of teaching fulfills a certain sense of security people are looking for. In a way it’s feeding on people’s insecurity. In the long run, there really aren’t any absolutes in dancing. It is art, it is about learning rules and then breaking rules. It’s about creating style, not boring robots. It’s not about learning right and wrong – that’s a waste of time! It’s about doing the work – training the body to physically move well – it takes time and physical effort, muscle building and learning muscle coordination. Classic sales line: “Oh you should take lessons from teacher ABC, because you don’t want to learn it wrong do you?”. Bonus points for wording questions with negatives or double negatives because that’s been found to be more effective manipulation.

Emphasizing style over technique. Classic Sales line: “Oh don’t take from teacher ABC, because they competed in (American Style/ International Style/ Smooth/ Ryhthm/ Standard/ Latin) and not (insert whatever style you want to sell here)”. People use this all the time in the ballroom world. I fell for this a couple times and avoided taking lessons from some really awesome teachers that really knew their stuff. The underlying technique of good movement is the same across just about everything. You might as well take lessons in ballet or modern or african or hip-hop. I often encourage my students to diversify. Do you really think that just one teacher has cornered the secret on understanding dance? I mean, really? Who do you think they learned from? Or how do you think they developed a unique style themselves without studying from multiple different sources?

Teachers that over compliment. Again, it’s feeding into something the student is looking for. (Acceptance? Acknowledgement? Desire?).

Teachers that over criticize. Some students will think, “Oh how wonderful, I have something to shoot for, I have work to do, I have a challenge.” This is a spot were a strong idea of work ethic can get you into trouble. Like I said earlier, It’s about the work. It’s about understanding the muscle development, the exercises to get there. It can actually be done very plainly and simply. Need to criticize? Not really. Need for guidance, yes definitely. Over criticalness can actually lead to worse performance, a lack of expressiveness, and a lack of play. All things that we really want more of in dancing.

Core Training: Getting Aware of the Transverse

2010-11-06T11:52:00.001-07:00

Sure people talk about training the core, and dance teachers talk about moving from the center, but what does that really mean? And what do you really do to train for it? And why train for it in the first place?

I often use this analogy with my students. Imagine you’re in the middle of a pool of water, if you push directly out, you have nothing to push against. You end up just moving water around and not going anywhere. If you’re at the edge of the pool, the wall is there, it’s solid, it’s not going anywhere. If you push against the wall you can send your self drifting off in to the water pretty far. Your core is like your natural internal wall for your body, if it’s toned, the rest of your body can work off against it. Your arms can push stronger from a strong center. Your legs can push out as well, allowing you to move with more stability, speed, and strength.

Without a strong core our centers are like jell-o. If you push out with the arms or legs to move half of that force just goes into counter-acting inefficient wiggly noise absorbed by the rest of your body. It can also cause lots of sheering type forces in the other joints in the body which just lead to injury. A strong core not only gives us more efficient movement, it prevents injury. (In fact, I’d say good movement and unhealthy injury prone movement are really opposite ends of one continuum – what you need to learn to get better movement – whether it’s dance or sport or yoga or whatever, is the same as what you need to learn to prevent injury).

The search for understanding

At one point I just got annoyed with some of the teachers out there. Many would talk about using your core, or moving from your center, but none of them would give any description of what that really was! One instructor was just like, “Got belly?”. That just wasn’t good enough for me. I had to seek out more information, I needed to find somebody who knew more about what was really going on. Dance people had a lot of the training ideas and exercises but lacked actual understanding (and thus lack consistency in the success of the training), yoga people also had some knowledge, had better understanding but again lacked enough understanding. It was with fitness people that I finally found the answers to the questions about core and center that I was looking for. (Check out the work of Paul Chek among many others.)

Transverse Abdominis

The transverse abdominis (or TVA) is a large surface of muscle that wraps around the sides of the body through the belly region. If you’re standing it’s fibers line up parallel with the ground and pull the front of the body around the sides to the spine in the back like a built in corset. It has the action of pulling the belly button in toward the spine. Cough. (Go ahead take a moment and cough, I’ll wait for you. That action is also a contraction of the TVA).

Contracting the TVA as an explicit exercise is taught in many movement types, you’ve probably already experienced already and just didn’t know it was the TVA that you were activating or supposed to activate. Ballet teacher telling you to “zip up”? Pilates teacher tell you to pull your belly button to your spine? Sports teacher tell you to pull your belly in like you’re about to get punched? Martha Graham style contraction? Belly Dancing actions… yoga breathing… the list goes on and on…

The TVA pulls on connective tissue surrounding the lumbar region of the spine (the low back). Not only creating protection for the low spine but also creating a center – a place for the rest of the body to work off of. Not only does this connective tissue wrap the spine but also wraps the lats (latissimus dorsi) going upward in the body to effect the arms, but also the iliopsoas muscles going downward in the body to effect the legs, and also the erector spine to effect the rest of the spine going upward. This wrapping effect around the muscles can even act as a multiplier effect on the efficiency of those muscles by squeezing them tighter.

Simple Exercise

Lie on the floor face down. Lift your belly button up off the floor, and hold if for as long as you can. Don’t cheat the exercise: when first doing this, it’s easy to cheat by lifting your belly button up by pushing into the floor with your legs or arms or shoulders or something else. Try to relax your limbs. Only lift your belly button by using the TVA (cough again just to get the feel for it). Can’t hold it very long? That’s ok, relax, and try again. Do 10 repetitions. Try to get to being able to hold it for 2 minutes straight. (Paul Chek says that’s just for good healthy movement in everyday life, if you’re a professional dancer, go for more!)

You don’t have to do the exercise everyday, 3 times a week is pretty good. Do it at the end of a workout instead of the beginning – if the core is weak from being tired, you’re more likely to injure yourself during normal exercise.

Integration

Ok, got awareness of your TVA? Got it stronger? Start integrating it into other movements you do. Could be anything. In advanced athletes the TVA is measured to activate several milliseconds before any other muscle activates in any action they do. Going to take a step across the floor? Contract the TVA before you push off your leg. Going to lift your arm? Contract the TVA before you do it. Going to make a connection with a dance partner (as lead or as follow or as just general partnering)? Contract your TVA before you connect. Even just going to lift your Starbucks coffee up to your mouth? Contract your TVA! :)

Knees

2010-10-24T13:15:00.001-07:00

Problems with knees usually aren’t problems with knees at all, but problems at the ankle or at the hip socket. Knees are actually pretty free formed joints, just like two bones in proximity to each other. No boney restrictions or muscular restrictions, but the combination of 6 ligaments restrict it’s movement to just bending in one direction, and once bent, some rotation. Knees tend to be high indicator joints, they are the points where pain tends to show up first, because they are so restricted in movement. The problem though isn’t at the knees, it’s at the surrounding joints – the ankle and the hip socket. Both the hip socket and the ankle have a huge range of motion, and if they aren’t held stiff with too much tension and they can move freely, then their movement takes all the stress out of knee joint.

Mobility

People have natural mobility in the ankle and hip socket, but if they don’t use it, or train themselves to force things too much the joint will get immobile. (One of those reason why people should avoid those teachers that teach over forcing movements just to look good or fast). It takes practice for people to learn to allow movement at the joint and relax away from forcing action at the hip and ankle.

Getting mobility going at the ankle and hip allows for natural ease and grace in movement. It gets rid of most of the ever being off balance a dancer will feel. It allows for a huge amount adaptation when you’re dancing with a partner (especially when dancing close in Standard or Smooth). It allows you to move around your center and adapt and change shape while just standing on a single spot and not moving (all those wonderful juicy moves that Bob and Julia used to do? yeah, work on your ankles and hip-sockets to make that sort of stuff easy.) It allows for easy leading in Standard from the body, and that nice rolling through the feet action that is needed to make Slow Foxtrot so slow.

Exercise 1 : Loosening the ankle

Lift one leg (you could be standing, sitting, laying down, doesn’t matter) and with the free leg make circles with the foot. Try to get as far around as you can – explore the full range of motion. Ready for a little change? A little more challenge? Trace the letters of the alphabet with your foot.

Exercise 2 : Plié (Squat)

Stand (could be feet/heels together -- “first position” or feet shoulder width apart -- “second position” do a few of both) and bend your knees and lower. Take a look down as you lower, does your knee track in the same direction of your foot easily? Does it track to the inside (very common)? or track to the outside? If your knee doesn’t track in the line of your foot, you have a tight hip socket or ankle – you needed this lesson! :)

When you lower, does your heel come off the ground? How far can you lower while keeping your heel on the ground? This insures that your working bend at the ankle – that’s the mobility we want to improve. Do several plié’s, only go as far as you can keep your heel on the ground – this isn’t a contest, you don’t get a prize for going lower – you get a prize for working the right joint – and that prize is better health. Pass go, collect $200, get better balance and grace, and reduce the chance of injury for your knee for the rest of your life.

When you lower, do you stick your butt out to the back? Do you tilt it up forward to the sky? Try to lower keeping your hips going straight down without tilting, so that your spine keeps it’s nice natural curve in the lumbar region. Like keeping the heel on the ground assures movement at the ankle, keeping the hips inline assures movement at the hip-socket.

(Plié from the french plier – to bend)

Exercise 3: Knee circles

You can find versions of this exercise in everything from gymnastics, to yoga, to gyrotonics, to ballroom, to whatever. Stand in a slight plie (with some bend in your knees) and make circles with your knees. Go clockwise, counter-clockwise, both knees in the same direction, go in opposite direction. Although the knees are the things moving though space you want to try to get most of the action happening at the ankles and hips – the knees won’t really be doing any work when you’re doing it right.

Remember, relax, have fun, learn to enjoy the movement and not force it. Here’s to happy knees!

Performance Anxiety

2010-10-03T13:11:00.001-07:00

How do you feel about performance? Many people have performance anxiety. Some studies put it as the number one fear of Americans. I remember seeing one of the last competitions one of my coaches did and the absolute fear and horror on his face. I personally never really had a problem with it, I’m kind of a ham. It wasn’t until I had a couple of students that had a big fear of performance that I started researching it a bit more. What is it? Why do people have it? What can you do about it?

I often try to find someone who has dealt with this issue before to learn from. Who deals with this the best? Dancers and dance teachers as a whole tend to ignore the situation. Although this has some merit in that by shrugging it off, as if it’s no big deal, that people will just relax about it. But that doesn’t work. Actors deal with performance anxiety the most, they’ve done the most research about it, they’re written about it the most, they talk about it the most. I remember reading an actress’s account of starting to learn to dance, and she was amazed at the total lack of dealing with the issue. That dancer’s just tried to ignore the problem.

What can we learn from theater? What makes it different?

Teaching Focus

When I first started taking acting lessons, it was a shock as to the completely different focus they had from dance lessons. In dance lessons there is perhaps an over concern and value placed on technique. And on a very extreme end taught very much in a right wrong perspective on technique. In acting classes the focus is on a different set of things. It’s on the individuality of the person, and on feedback, positive feedback about how the person is presenting themselves.

Now if you are worried about everything being right or wrong, where is your concern directed? What are the consequences of doing something wrong? Of course you’re going to get tense performing with that kind of focus. Of course you get tense and since a large part of good dance technique is about being able to relax muscles, well there goes half your technique out the window. You’ll probably even feel worse then!

Uniqueness

What if your focus and goal is on something else? What if it’s about showing your uniqueness, your individuality? Then perhaps making mistakes just shows humanity. It shows willingness taking risks. It shows courage.

Think about why you go to watch other people perform, whether it’s dance, music, comedy, or theater. Do you really go to see them to see how perfectly they can do it? Do you go to dance competitions to say, “Oh they did that Natural Turn so perfectly!” (If you do you’re probably fooling yourself). Aren’t you actually more paying attention to HOW they did their Natural Turn? Aren’t you actually fascinated that all of the top couples do it slightly differently? That the best couples do it differently every single time they do it.

When you watch performers aren’t you actually fascinated by the fact that they are all at different levels? Doesn’t it make it more valuable to actually watch one performer at one level and another performer at a different level? I personally love going to the comedy club. A popular format is having 3 different performers. One local, one regional, one national, each at different levels and abilities, all in one night, one after the other. You can really learn about what is comedy, what are the components about it, what makes the good stuff good.

Don’t you want to see people at different levels? I can’t tell you how many times after doing a showcase that the people that inspire others to dance the most are the beginners? “Oh! I think I could do that.”

Extraordinary

People have ordinary lives. They get up they go to work, they come home, they eat food, they sleep. It’s practical. We have to do that. We train our children not to be way overly emotional or crazy – and that’s healthy. We need that to deal with the world as it is now. If the building is burning, we don’t have time to worry about how we feel about it right now, we need to get out of the building.

But we are emotional beings. We have feelings, we feel sad, happy, angry, disgusted, surprised, have contempt, and have fear. These things are hardwired into us (check out the book Emotions Revealed by Paul Ekman). When we go to see people perform we go to see something out of the ordinary – something extra ordinary – people expressing themselves. Allowing us as audience members for a moment to dance with the dancer on stage, be in the position of the actor in the play, be connected to the comedian. To live vicariously through them. To allow all the emotions that we want to express so badly to be expressed through them.

When we perform, if we’re not concerned and distracted by getting it right or wrong, we can express. We can be a vehicle for people to be expressed. In a way we can allow the audience a small amount of healing the pain of not being able to express in our overly practical world. Performance can actually be one of the best gifts we can give to our fellow human being.

I find that perspective, that performance is a gift and not a fear of judgement, is the key to dissolving performance anxiety. But it takes practice and an approach to teaching to make it happen.

Play to Win

2010-10-02T12:17:00.001-07:00

Not the cliché, narrow, meaning of that title, to go all out in a performance or game, but a double meaning. Play as in fun, as playing a game, as if a kid. Winning as in the big picture, winning in life.

Engagement

We all seek engagement. Of being wrapped up in something, totally involved. We crave it for work, hobbies, the entertainment we watch, whether it’s dance, theater, movies, or tv. We crave it in our conversations and relationships. In what areas of your life are you engaged? How do you get more engaged in something? What is it that causes engagement? How can you have more of it?

Puritan Work Ethic

American society has a mis-concept about work and work ethic. There is this idea that you must be “serious” about your work. That you have to work hard to get somewhere, that it can’t be fun. (Students fall for this all the time -- “oh that teacher is better, because he is tough and gives a lot of correction, it’s hard work.” and the teacher having a ton of fun or taking it easy isn’t considered good.) But most of modern psychology (from “A Theory of Game Design” by Raph Koster, to “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, to “Drive” by Daniel Pink, and many others) points to the opposite. Fun and play is the path to mastery.

Games

How can you turn what you are doing at any point in time into a game? Kids are great at this. Kids are naturally engaged and excited and all about having fun. We need to keep that into adulthood, and bring it back to our lives when it’s missing.

If you’re teaching a class, don’t correct people just to correct them like some right or wrong thing. That will just make it no fun. But engage them. Make it a game. “oo! Go faster”, or “good, now stronger”, or “now softer”. Challenge your students. Play with them. Become a kid again.

Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is this super bright awesome psychology professor who’s done a ton of research and written a ton of different books about the positive aspects of psychology from creativity to flow. Flow is that totally engaged state. The state where you’re active in doing whatever you’re doing, totally absorbed into it. Time can pass super slow in it, and it can pass incredibly fast in it.

How do you get to flow more often? One of the essential elements of flow is a balance between the challenge of the task and the ability of the person. Too challenging and the person will give up, too easy and the person will be bored. If you’re writing a computer game you want it to start out easy, but not too easy. As they play longer, it gets tougher. Good teachers balance this very well in students. Give just enough feedback, but not too much, sense how the student responds, adapt, adjust, find their level and get them engaged.

On your own if you are doing something, adapt your goals in the moment to make the balance right for you. If you have a huge task, break it down, don’t try to do it all, choose a easier version of it at first, or break it up into a smaller part. Learn to develop this skill in itself.

Go

Go out and try it out. There is no reason why not to learn to be totally engaged and live fully in everything you do. Some would say this is the truest development of self, what you were born to do in the first place, it just got lost along the way.

Creativity

2010-09-26T13:47:00.001-07:00

How is your creativity skill? Often in studies on people who are creative and those who are not creative one major difference stands out. The people who thought they were creative were and those that didn’t weren’t. But does that really help? I think not. (As one author put it, “TBU: True but useless”.) Let’s look at some basic concepts of creativity.

Phases

Researching a bit into different writing about creativity one of the things that comes up frequently is the idea of different phases of creativity. Most break this up into 3 or 4 different phases. I will break it up into three. First, a generation or creation phase. This is the phase were you create ideas, brainstorm, dream, or whatever you want to call it. The second phase is a phase of reducing. Here you trim down the number of options that you created in the first phase to a more limited or applicable set. In the third phase you take a single idea and refine it, manipulate it, modify it, and get it into an actual useable form of the idea.

Different fields and forms of art have different requirements to the balances of these three phases. Some are heavy on generating a lot of ideas (like graphic artists making a few hundred versions of a logo). Some are heavy on culling down the ideas (too many great things to do, not enough time, often computer programming is like that). Some are heavy on the editing/tweaking phase (dance can be a lot of that, acting can be that way, writing poetry can be that way).

Often I see the problem of people working in groups where they are not clear about what phase they are in at any one point in time. Ever been in a brainstorming group and as the others are throwing out one great idea after another and there’s someone there just saying, “no no no that won’t work”. That person is out of phase with the rest of the group.

Blocks

Creativity is one of those things (like enthusiasm, love, and sexuality) that people actually have an endless supply of but it’s their own internal blocks that prevent it from letting it be expressed. It is less a skill to build doing creativity, and more so a skill to build not blocking it from happening. We are a society that over trains ourselves for the single right answer. As the famous educator Neil Postman once said, “children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.”

Mind mapping (read Tony Buzan’s Mind Map book) is an excellent way to start to train people not to block their ideas. The idea is that you start with a central idea and expand from that. Adding relationships and associations as one builds out from the center. Try not to limit what you associate with the other ideas. If you thought of it, it’s valid, add it to the mind-map. Sometimes it might be funny, bazaar, wacky, odd, and every time it will be different, even if you started with the same word or center idea.

Criticism

We, as humans are actually really good at remembering things. Perhaps too good. And unfortunately too good at remembering criticisms. This is a huge block to creativity. I see a lot of teachers just blatantly criticize in their teaching. It’s true you need to give feedback to a student, but you have to make sure the student understands that it’s there for them to learn so they have more technical skill to accomplish more with technical ability and not less by restricting what they do. If you move with your leg and foot in this way, then you will be able to move faster, stronger, more expressive, etc. Not you must move your leg in this way because it’s right and that’s they way to do it, all other ways are wrong. And then wonder why your student is not expressive, they look dry and boring.

The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey is an excellent source of ways to teach to help students get rid of their inner critical voice and also how to teach to not put it there in the first place.

Group Think

Working in a group sometimes you can end up with less creative results than might be possible. If you do one of the classical exercises for brainstorming where people kind of free through ideas out into a pile one right after the other, maybe you have observed this. Our brains think associatively, one thought leads to another. As one person adds an idea to the group it steers the group. The group then ends up having a single conscience idea and not divergent ideas.

Tony Bazan noticed this and recommended a different approach to group creativity exercises. First start with each member of the group separate – on their own. Then working individually they all mind-map out their ideas. Only after they’ve come up with their own unique ideas they come back together and share their ideas. This simple change gets rid of a lot of the group think and results in more variation.

The Independence Factor

2010-09-25T12:19:00.001-07:00

Are you given a lot of leeway in what you do? Are you closely monitored? Are you told every little detail of what to do? Most people thrive when they are given more space, when they are allowed to make their own mistakes, and try on their own to make things work. On the other side what often blocks us or prevents us from progressing on with what we need to do is just not knowing what to do.

So, where do you fall on this continuum? As a student, how much instruction do you need? how much freedom do you need? As a teacher, how much instruction do you give to your student? how much do they want? how much do they need? As a manager? As a business owner?

People tend to error a bit on the side of over instruction, over management, and not on the side of patience and giving space and time for the student/worker/friend/partner to experiment, to learn, to fix it themselves. I’m always annoyed by the student in class who feels obligated to tell the person they’re dancing with what to do. Or worse at a social dance. Or a spouse telling the other spouse what to do. Just chill out! Back off, and let the other one have some peace so they can think and learn.

As you get more experienced as a teacher/manager you get better as sensing just where people are, do they need more information, or do they need space?

In studios there can be a huge range of what studios offer for instruction for the teachers working there. Some provide excellent private lessons from other teachers for coaches coming in. On the flip side I’ve also heard horror stories of just instructors just being shacked up in a back room so they can watch dance videos.

At the first studio I worked at the owner was a nice guy, and fairly knowledgeable of dance and would give the other teachers free lessons. Unfortunately, he was an alcoholic. Often gone or just totally unreliable. One day one of the other instructors was complaining to me about the situation, about how he wished he could get more instruction. Now that struck a chord with me, I’m not one to just sit and complain, I’m someone of action. From that point forward I vowed to be personally responsible for my instruction, for my learning, for my growth in dancing. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

In the beginning it’s good to have guidance, to learn from others, to depend on them for your growth and development. But in the long run, I’ve always found that moving to your own independence is required to fully develop your dancing. There are teachers out there that will spoon feed you, even try to keep you as a forever student. I know, there’s some comfort in that. In our society we are kind of taught that the one who gives more information is the smarter one, and some students are seduced by that, but most of the time I’ve found that the quieter, softer spoken teacher is better.

In the long run I’ve always found it better to find the other teachers, the ones that push for your own independence. I push my own students for their independence. I’d rather have a equal, and someone that I can eventually learn from than a forever student.

Technique, Style, and Choreography

2010-09-19T12:40:00.001-07:00

Often these ideas are collapsed into one idea or concept in dancing (it happens in other styles too, not just ballroom). I think it’s important to separate them out to really understand what is going on, and learn most effectively.

Technique

Technique is really the practice and training of proper, healthy movement. It’s about the quality of the movement. Common concepts in this are: moving from the center, alignment of the bones/joints, sequencing of movements, functions of joints, balance use of muscles, strength, and so on. At the base of it, the simplest level, it’s about health of the body and health of movement, moving up the challenge/skill level, it’s about speed, efficiency, grace, and power. This is all one continuum of range.

We all have an in built feeling for what is good movement. We can all see someone move and think, “oooo… ouch, I bet that hurts…” or “that doesn’t look comfortable”. And no matter what you have actually trained in dance, you’re probably right. Trust your instincts. We can also see the far range – we can look at an athlete and appreciate how wonderfully smooth, easy, and powerfully they move. It’s probably written into our DNA to recognize these things.

In ballroom dancing we have a book “The Technique of Ballroom Dancing”. Perhaps misleading though, because it’s not really technique at all, but really choreography. Yes, perhaps having written so many details about this step or that and by careful analysis and comparison of them all you could piece out some elements of technique. (And there are coaches out there that will teach just such analysis.) But in the end, this is not really technique, this is just the steps, and nothing can replace the value of simply training for good movement. In fact most of the details in the book will happen easily and without effort or stress if they are just done with good movement.

Hmmm… someone should come up with a systematic way of training good movement. Break things down to their fundamental movements – moving forward, backward, sideways, up, down, lifting the leg, lifting the arms, turning, jumping. Maybe someone could make a lot of money from that. Oh, wait, somebody already came up with that 300 years ago – it’s ballet and people don’t give it the credit that it’s due.

Style

Technique is how you do things for the health of your body – it is universal across different dance types (ballet, modern, ballroom) and movement types (martial arts, sports, yoga, pilates). Style is how you do things that don’t effect or compromise the technique. It can be about creating a feeling, personality, attitude, difference, or quality of being. Technique is just a tool to train and allow your body to do style and choreography.

How do you create a style? There are an infinite number of things the body can do but you can’t do all of them no matter how long your dance is. Why not choose just a particular set of things that you do movement-wise? It is in the choice that we create style.

Some people have created their style as unconscious choice. They perform certain sports, certain actions again and again. It’s not that some other choice would not be as technically correct, it’s just the way they do it. Some dance schools teach a specific set of exercises and in the same time that they might be teaching technique they also teach a specific style. Martha Graham is a style. Cuttingham is a style. Vaganova is a style.

Want to develop your style more (and your understanding of style)? A great exercise is to take a list of a variety of different movements. (Laban is great for this – read “Modern Educational Dance”. Or simply the list of dance positions out of the Latin “technique” book.) Cut the list in half. Then make a dance from what is remaining. Repeat again but do it from the half of the list that you cut. Repeat again with a different list.

Choreography

Choreography is the actual movement that is done. Put together in a combination over time. It is the complete piece or just parts. It relies on style to create differences across time. (How boring are those pieces that are too monotonic in style!) And relies on technique to make it first just comfortable to watch and secondly to allow it to be executed.

5 simple things beginners can do to move (and dance) better

2010-09-06T19:20:00.001-07:00

We all have busy lives. There are some easy changes you can do to in your everyday life to make your dancing better without much effort.

1. Brush your teeth while standing on one foot.

Pretty easy really, in the morning stand on your right foot, in the evening stand on your left foot. Your body with automatically improve in it’s ability to balance. Time cost: zero, and you get a mini ballet lesson everyday (it’s like doing a basic form of tendu’s :) ).

2. When you walk down the street, walk with your feet parallel.

Roll through the foot so that your weight leaves the foot between the big and index toes. Too many people walk around with their feet turned out – an action that weakens your arch and is inefficient. Your foot is your lever arm to move your body relative to the ground. With feet parallel they are at their greatest length and thus the most powerful. (And yup, the main reason why ballet dancers dance with turn-out? to maximize efficient movement sideways – so they can stay facing the audience while they move across the floor).

3. Park on the far side of the parking lot.

Walking is a natural movement that balances the muscles in the body. Take half a minute to walk the extra 100 yards across the parking lot any time you can. It’s good for you.

4. If you have a desk job, get up and walk around more often.

Some fitness experts recommend every 20 minutes! You can set an alarm in Outlook to tell you to get up. Sitting all the time shortens the front muscle chain in the body. Notice all those people out there walking around with bad posture – with their heads sticking way forward of their bodies like a turtle? Shoulders all slumped forward to the front of the body? That’s a short front muscle chain. So, get up and go visit your coworkers, find out what they’re working on. It makes a better work environment.

5. Go barefoot at home.

As one dance teacher described it, when we are born our feet have as much dexterity and mobility as our hands, but we put our feet in these little leather coffins called shoes and they proceed to die for the rest of our lives. Did we evolve with shoes on our feet? Going barefoot allows our feet to waken up and move around more, all the small muscles in the feet can get exercise that they normally wouldn’t by wearing shoes.

Classic reward and punishment = FAIL

2010-09-05T12:48:00.001-07:00

Classic ideas that we need to reward good things and punish bad things leads to improvement don’t really work. Extrinsic rewards are not the way for people to be motivated. People need to learn to intrinsically motivate themselves.

I used to like the word passion, but I don’t anymore. I like the word enthusiasm. Why? “Passion” comes from French meaning to suffer. People who have a “passion” for something suffer for it. How many people do you know suffer for their dancing? Enthusiasm comes from Greek-- “En” : inner or within and “theos” – god. Enthusiasm is channeling the inner god – your inner energy.

You want great dance students? Don’t reward or punish them. Teach them to motivate themselves.

Watch this great video on motivation:

As a great yogi once said, “the winds of enthusiasm are always blowing, one need only learn to open one’s sails and take flight”.

Appreciation Needs to be Taught

2010-09-04T13:20:00.003-07:00

“That dress was aweful!”

“That singer isn’t any good”

“Their dancing is horrible”

or any number of the other caddy things students (or even teachers say). Is it wrong to have an option? no. But if it blinds you to not see the big picture then it’s a problem. If it prevents you from seeing what you can learn from these outside sources, what you can take from it, how it can improve your artistry, then it’s a problem. If it prevents you from enjoying your performance, then it’s a problem. If it prevents you from learning to do what you actually need to do, then it’s a problem.

Sadly with art being taught less and less in schools, people turn out more critical than ever. Art takes work. Learning art teaches appreciation.

Music

Often you’ll hear students complain that they don’t like one artist or another. They don’t like Britney Spears or Celine Dion or country music or hard rock or whatever. Often it has nothing to do with if the music is good or not but what they’ve been programmed by their piers to like or dislike, and it’s obvious. Do they understand what is going on in the music? no. Do they hear the layering, the editing that has gone into it, the production value, the rhythm patterns? no. And so can they dance the feeling of the music? no. Can they play with the music?

To truly dance to music you need to understand music. There are four major aspects to music: melody (pitch), rhythm (timing), dynamics (loudness), and timber (what instrument it is). Fred Astaire would say not to dance as a slave to the music, but dance as if you were another instrument accompanying the band. So at times you music go with it and times you must break from it.

Walter Laird would tell his students to “keep the music with you in a suitcase in your head”. I love that imagery. So beautiful. So wise. You must know the music enough in your head to recreate it, as if you were dancing to your own music all the time.

Do you listen to all the elements of the music? Do you dance with all of them? Do you play with them? Against them? Through them? Around them?

Costume

There’s a huge range of costumes out there on the dance floor. There’s an element of popular style that people follow from time to time, and thankfully still a good number of people that are brave enough to break the style, or push it.

I remember watching a competition and this girl had this really awesome dress on – neon bright, you couldn’t miss it on the floor, a very fun color. It had a ton of fringe so it really moved nice and showed her movement well. And a week later hearing some of my students just complaining horribly about it. And it was just out of spite and hate and not an ounce of appreciation. I felt ashamed of them being my students.

Go out there and wear wild costumes, be brave, have fun, be playful. If it’s not you and you don’t feel comfortable in it then don’t wear it. But if it’s wild and cool and exciting and bold, do it!

Dancing

Dancers watching other dancers can be so critical. Too critical. This is the most tragic loss. There’s something to learn from other people’s movement. Often it’s to the point that they don’t see the goodness out of someone else’s movement that they desperately need to add to their own movement, too their own performance.

One of the first coaches I had was very critical and taught that to his students. In a big way it was a big plus to him selling his own lessons – his students were all convinced he was the only one that could teach good dancing. Even when it was blatantly obvious to the non-brainwashed that the best dancers just didn’t dance like anything he said!

I am always amazed when ballroom dancers are hyper critical about ballet or modern -- “Oh I don’t what to do that, blah blah blah”. Or “oh I don’t like that abstract interpretive stuff”. It’s too bad because the average ballet or modern dancer learns to move in a couple years much better than the average ballroom dancer learns in 20 years.

I hate the phrase “no pain no gain”

2010-09-04T13:20:00.001-07:00

At least when it comes to dancing. Dancing is not supposed to hurt! If it hurts you’re probably doing it wrong. Most of the technique is there mostly just to avoid injury (not to “look good” or “fit a style” but to avoid injury!). It’s so that you move well so that you can keep on dancing until your 80 or 90 or beyond.

That being said, it is important to understand that there are types of pain that are good and types of pain that are bad. As a dancer you will probably experience all of them at some point. You will grow familiar with them and understand which ones are signals to stop and which ones are signals to do more. And most of that is just listening to what your body is telling you.

Muscle soreness.

This is a good pain. It comes the day after you workout. Often comes more from the time when you workout after you haven’t worked out in a long time. And it’s often a signal more of the connective tissue needing to change than the muscle needing to change. You need to rest (roughly 48 hours for muscles) and give the muscle time to recover, then work it out again. It’ll most likely be gone the second day after you workout.

Muscle tightness or softness.

More often the tightness in our society but sometimes softness. Often accompanying muscle soreness, but not the actual muscle soreness. Again, it will come the day after you workout (or sometimes if you workout in the morning and sit for most of the day). Tightness usually implies the connective tissue needs to lengthen and loosen (more common in our society – we hold too much tension!). Softness implies the connective tissue needs to tighten (sometimes the case if you are adapting to a new sport you’ve never done before). This kind of pain can last much longer than 48 hours. You have to use a bit of good judgment – workout again, but if gets worse back off a bit. It can take several months for connective tissue to change.

Sharp, sudden, or pinching pain.

Bad. Very bad. Stop immediately. You’re probably doing something wrong. Check your technique. Goals are for opening up your joints, loosening them up, nice alignment of the bones, and increasing space in the joints. Lower the weight or stress you are working out with. Better to workout with less than to workout and cause an injury.

Muscle recovery.

A similar pain to muscle tightness, but different. It will feel like tightness in that it restricts the movement. General muscle tightness usually feels even across the muscle, muscle recovery feels more like there are just spots of the muscle that need pulling. Often muscle recovery pain was caused by some injury in the past, and you’re sort of re-straightening out the fibers. Muscle tightness was probably just caused by prolonged holding the muscle in a shortened position.

Why Practice?

2010-07-18T19:39:00.001-07:00

When you go to practice, why do you go to practice? For what purpose? I see many students (and professionals) practice for the wrong reasons. To make it “perfect”, or “right”, or to make it all fast or all sharp, are all reasons that will just lead your dancing to become mediocre, boring, and just simply worse. In fitness there is an adage that says “never go to the gym and do the same workout that you did before.” The body and mind adapt fast, even faster than the conscience can monitor it. Repeating the same practice again and again and again will get people nowhere except cement in their bodies the same mediocre, boring, and often just wrong technique.

Some how by practicing the same thing the same way all the time, magically one day *poof*, you'll be a great dancer? I don't think so. Martha Graham said “it takes ten years to make a dancer.” And Malcolm Gladwell backs that up in his book “Outliers” – it takes 10,000 hrs (about 10 years) of study of something to become and expert at it. But it takes good use of that time. As Steve McConnell puts it, “10 years of the same 1 year of experience repeated does not make 10 years of experience.”

No worries. For years I practiced the wrong way and I didn't realize how much I was wasting my time for so long.

Never practice the same routine twice the same way.

“Consistency is the death of good acting.” (Micheal Shurtleff, Audition) and consistency is the death of good dancing.

Choose a reason to practice each time. Plan it out. Plan for variety, plan for growth and learning. Take what ever you can from any subject you can.

for relaxation
for speed
for stretch
for mental focus
for connection with partner
for connection with audience
for owning space
for a laban dynamic
for an emotion
for musical variety / rhythmical challenge
for discovery
for phrasing
for rhythm
for space changes
for direction
for mistakes
for focus
for theatrical focus direction (past/present/future)
for balance
for shape

Mental Calisthenics

2010-07-11T16:13:00.001-07:00

There are two typical ways people view memories and time. One way is to view time out in front of you as a line from left to right where now is a spot apart from you and in front of you in the line. Another way is to view time stretching out forward and back from where you are standing where the future is in front and the past is behind you. Take a moment to think about how your brain typically stores memories and thinks about time.

This is a little mental exercise. Sort of a meditation. Try it out.

Take an image of a memory you’ve had. It could be a good memory or a bad memory, or whatever. Where is it stored in you head? Is it off to the left? Is it behind you? Where is it?

That image of the that memory in your head, is it spinning? What direction is it spinning? If it’s hard to tell, spin the image to the left and to the right, which direction does it turn the easiest? If it was a good memory, keep it spinning in the direction it’s going, maybe even speed it up a bit. If it was a bad memory, spin it in the opposite direction that it was spinning before.

If you’re a person that typically thinks of time as forward and back, put the memory back where it was before. If you’re a person that thinks of memories out in front of you left to right, then put this memory back behind you.

Do this exercise a few times. Practice this form of mental image manipulation. Get good at it. See how you feel in a few days.

Muscle Chains

2010-07-04T16:29:00.001-07:00

This is it! Chuck’s miracle cure for most of your technique aliments. You’ll move better, your body will enjoy it, and you’ll look awesome. But for it to work, you must learn some theory…

The model you have for your body and how it works effects understanding of how things work and how to fix things. The better the model, the easier it is to fix things. And for doing dance well and having some really fantastic natural-animalistic-juicy-yummy movement you need to have a better model.

Without directly talking about the muscle chains, most of good body movement technique is based on it. You can see it in the technique of weight-lifting, ballet, modern, jazz, ballroom, latin, yoga, and gyrotonics.

Simple Model

You were probably taught this in high-school. Muscles are connected to bones, muscles pull across a joint to move the bones. Not a bad simple model. If you understand that stressing a muscle (exercise, lifting weights, etc) will cause injury and then rebuilding will change it (make it bigger, or stronger, or more shaped, or faster, or more coordinated) then you can apply that practically. Understanding that different types of exercise/stress will cause different types of rebuilding allows you to be very specific about your development.

So, with the simple model and a bit of knowledge you can go a long way. But to develop further you need a more complex model of how things work.

Basic muscle chains

Muscles don’t actually exist on their own, one by one, just connecting and pulling one bone to another. Muscles always exist in a chain of connective tissue – kind of like a string of sausages before they’ve been cut apart. At the points where the sausage links come together to a point is where the muscle ties down to a bone. Or even more appropriately wraps around the bone at that point.

There are six really basic muscle chains to know about at first.

1. The front chain. The front chain starts on the top of the foot at the toes, goes across the top of the foot, up the front of the legs, up the front of the abdomen up to the top of the sternum and then from the sternum to the ears through the sternocleidomastoid and then wraps up at the crown of the head.

2. The back chain. The back chain starts at the bottom of the foot at the toes, goes across the bottom of the foot and then up the back of the legs, up the back along the spine through the erector spinae and then wraps over the top of the head to end at the eyebrows.

3. The lateral chains (left and right). These chains start on the side of the foot, run up the side of the legs, along the side of the torso through the inner and outer obliques and up the sides of the neck.

4. The spiral chains. These chains start at the back of the skull, wrap around the torso like a giant sash and then wrap around the leg of the side of the skull they started on, wrap around the middle of the bottom of the foot like a stirrup and then return to their origin at the skull along the back of the body.

5. The back arm chain. The back arm chain starts at the spine, goes through the latisimus dorsi to the shoulder, through the triceps to the elbow and then along wrist flexors out to the hand.

6. The front arm chain. The front arm chain starts at the sternum, goes through the pectorals to the shoulders, through the biceps to the elbows and through wrist flexors out to the hand.

So what? How do I apply that? How does that get me natural movement?

One, you need to know the old saying – practice makes perfect – or the other common version – perfect practice makes perfect – or whatever version you subscribe to. To give a little more detail – every time you do a physical action you build a pathway from your mind to your muscle – sort of like walking a path in a field. Every time you do that action you body builds a better wire to signal it, like the path in the field gets worn each time it is walked. It becomes the default path or action that you do. (Don’t waste your time thinking about technique when you perform, build your path in your practice well before and show your character and life and expression when you perform!)

Now let’s start to look at some aspects of applying the chain.

Misbalanced use of a single chain

Ideally for nice natural movement you will activate all the muscles along the chain roughly equally. If one muscle is over activated it will pull on the rest of the chain and reduce effectiveness elsewhere in the chain.

A good example is the arm chains where people tend to way over use the muscles in the forearm or the muscles in the elbow to shoulder region. This can lead to a really horrible jerky forceful uncomfortable feeling of connection (for both latin and standard). Often the correction teachers give for this is to pull the shoulder blade down (activating the latissimus dorsi) or just simply activating the lat muscle. (Sometimes a correction to activate the pectoral muscles more.) A good start! Correcting the highest nail, it will inch the student along closer to the overall good feeling. If the student doesn’t fall into the trap of focusing on details but on how does that one correction help fit into the best overall feeling then we’ll probably end up in the right place.

How about the problem of students not pointing their feet as their leg swings forward in latin? Note the top of the foot and forward hip flexor are part of the same muscle chain. What if we could get that student to use the psoas (not part of the front chain) to swing the leg forward and relax the front part of the quadricept? Oh! suddenly the top of the ankle is relaxed and a beautiful point is easy.

Misbalanced use of a chain against its opposite chain

The front chain can work in opposition against the back chain. The lateral chains can work against the other lateral chain on the opposite side. The front arm chain works against the back arm chain.

Nice posture is a fantastic example of the back and front chain in opposition. Imagine for a minute the feeling of being forward on your feet, heels touching the floor but just that touching. (As one Blackpool lecturer put it, “your heels touch the floor as if you’re kissing your mother-in-law”). In this position the bottom of the feet activate – the start of the back chain. If you were back-weighted (like so many people are these days) with weight in the heel you cut off the activation through the bottom of the feet. The entire back chain is slack at one point and can no longer work in an efficient manner.

If we are in a forward weighted position, with the bottom of our feet active, now the back chain starts to pull and be able to be active together. The back of the calves activate and we can start to get a feel of straightening our knees without locking them (locking the knees is sign of activating the front chain and not the back). And we can start to find a better position of the hip. One where the front muscles and back muscles can work at the same time, balancing the body and allowing nice freedom of movement through the hip socket. (Have tight hips? learn to stand nicer! :) ) Once the hips are in a nice spot we can continue to work this front back balance all the way up through the body. The back releases it’s tension, the rib-cage – it becomes easier to breathe, the head settles back into a nice position that allows for easy turning.

It’s like a miracle drug! Just finding the proper balance between front and back chains. Imagine nicer more natural bounce in Jive, freer action through the torso for rumba and samba, better jumping ability, easier freer movement to the upper body. If you’re doing ballet, better plie’s, better releve’s, better transitions between all of them.

The Best $2 I Ever Spent On My Dance Education

2010-06-27T18:33:00.001-07:00

It was back when I first started teaching. One Saturday I was out with my girlfriend at the time and we were fishing through the used books in the basement of the local university book store. (Yup, that’s right, that’s the geeky kind of casual dates I take girls on. And I’m single, imagine that! :) ) So anyway my girlfriend hands me a book she finds – something about “dance” and “education” and some really bland cover. I thought “looks pretty boring, but sure, I’ll get it, it’s only $2.” And then it sat on my bookshelf for a few months.

So one day I finish some book and wonder “what should I read next? maybe I’ll grab something from what I have already instead of buying something new at the bookstore.” (Amazon wasn’t around yet.) So I pick out this book again -- “Modern Educational Dance” by Valerie Preston-Dunlop and I start reading it.

Understand this is a time just into when I started teaching, when I really start to question “how do you train really good dancers? not just any dancers, but really great ones, for the most part looking around it’s hit or miss – random if the teacher can even teach – random if the student can learn.” And being the scientific mind that I am, thinking “there’s got to be a better way, there has to be a more successful and more organized way.”

So I get into this book, and it’s awesome. It for the most part is an English translation of the work in German of Rudolf Laban plus some extra writing by Valerie Preston-Dunlop on her analysis of it. The main work is a series of 16 lessons grouped into the themes of body, space, dynamics, and social relationships. Laban breaks down a very systematic way of looking at all movement in all it’s variations and even more importantly HOW TO TEACH IT. It’s genius.

I of course got busy working on improving my dancing. It’s important to DO and not just KNOW. You need to practice and experiment to really learn, so every weekend I would go out clubbing. But while other people where busy getting drunk or hitting on girls, I was out on the floor doing the exercises from the book. Experimenting with curved lines versus straight lines. Playing with heavy vs light dynamics or flexible vs direct or sudden vs sustained. Yup, dance geek, that’s me.

At the time I really didn’t realize that I should fit that all into my ballroom and latin dancing. Sadly there are a lot of dance teachers out there, stuck on very minor details that mean very little. Not to mention a very narrow minded focus that the only place to learn latin is from a latin teacher and the only place to learn standard is from a standard teacher – mostly really a sales tactic, good dancing is good dancing.

So one day I was taking a lesson from Jose Decamps and he starts explaining something to me. “So, like flexible and direct?” I say. And emphatically he says “YES!”. So we talk more about modern and Laban and Jose’s like, “why don’t you apply what you know about modern to your ballroom?” That was a big turning point for me.

Now you see it all the time. Michael Malitowski and Joanna Leunis have done several Blackpool lectures about Laban in Latin. Ruud Vermey has a whole chapter on it in his book “Latin: thinking sensing and doing”. You can find it in technique videos.

It’s well worth your time to learn what’s there and practice it. Take for example practicing your routines. For one month each morning do your dance routines in each of your dances and do them each once in all the eight basic Laban dynamics (wringing; pressing; floating; gliding; slashing; thrusting; dabbing; and flicking). And then do a round where you just mix it all up and have fun. I can guarantee if you do that for a month your dancing will be tons better. You’ll be able to learn movement better; you’ll move better yourself; probably improve your core strength a bit; you’ll be able to see other people’s style and be able to learn and replicate it sooner.

Oh… and the reason the book was only $2 – it was a misprint – there are about 50 pages printed twice in the book.

Attitude

2010-06-20T13:21:00.001-07:00

Attitude Attitude Attitude. Probably the most important thing to your dancing (ok, life) is your attitude. I’m going to talk about one specific area of that. What is your answer to the question, are people fundamentally changeable or are people fundamentally fixed?

In dancing this comes up as “you needed to have started when you were kid” or “natural talent” or “he/she is a natural”. So where do you stand, do you think you needed to start young, or could you start at any age? Is it all learnable?

I believe everything is learnable. There is great change that you can make if you have the right knowledge and dedicate the time. You need to have both. There are plenty of students that I’ve seen spend hours and hours and hours practicing the wrong thing. I feel even I was stuck in a rut like that for a few years. I also see that at the gym – plenty of people working out but not in a way that will get them any progress. The opposite it also possible – the student that can quote twenty things the last coach they had told them, but hasn’t practiced a single one.

I think it’s easy to fall back into the idea that you need to be “gifted”. In our society we have an epidemic of parents teaching their kids that they are all “special”. Kind of grown out of a misconception of studies in the 70’s that found there was a correlation between students that got good grades and confidence. Out of that correlation somehow we got to, “oh we need to worry about our kids confidence and that will improve their grades!” Well, guess what, it doesn’t work. Just cause A correlates with B doesn’t mean A causes B (in Latin, the logic fallacy: cum hoc ergo propter hoc – with this therefore follows this). But perhaps instead some other thing C (like HARD WORK) causes both A (confidence) and B (good grades).

The book Mindset:The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck is just about this topic. She describes Fixed Mindset as those people who believe you have natural or born talent and Growth Mindset as those people who believe change is possible and things are more a matter of hard work and effort.

It’s possible to have a fixed mindset in one area (say physical ability) and an growth mindset in another area (math). It’s possible to believe only a certain amount is changeable or everything or nothing.

I used to be 6ft tall and 135 pounds (scrawny!), but I studied. I read all about weight lifting and how to do it, what to do, what is most effective for different types of results. And then I just followed the advice. It was easy, I gained 40 pounds of muscle in less than a year! (Ok, there was a tough part – it was the eating – I had to stuff myself till I felt like was going to burst for a lot of meals).

And yet after that there were still some body things that I still felt weren’t changeable. Not until I was dating a girl and I started training her. Tons of body changes, and all within a few months. Broader wider shoulders, the shoulders more relaxed onto the back, straighter, cleaner looking legs (oh yeah bow leggedness and knocked-knees are pretty fixable in most people), better posture, big and little toes that don’t curve inward but have a nice straight alignment out from the heel.

But after seeing that and many other radical body transformations since then. I am a total believer that great change is possible.

I used to not think about bringing this up with students. That perhaps I should just stick to the physical, the facts, the steps. But now I know you have to bring it up, and bring it up early. It’s important. As one book on coaching I read put it: To make radical changes you must ask deeper and deeper questions. It can make a huge difference between a student that is easy to teach and one that is difficult to teach.

Books to Read

Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Rush Rush Rush

2010-06-13T18:52:00.001-07:00

It’s easy to see a lot of dancers just rushing from one thing to the next. Running around one pose or trick to the next as if it were a race. It cheapens the dance. Isn’t it wonderfully juicy to see people slow down, take some time, be in the moment. Even the most basic of step can take on magical powers. To do that it takes focus, courage, strength, and visualization.

Focus

It is said that our society over values the narrow objective focus. Narrow in that we are trained to focus on one thing, objective in that we are trained to focus detached and judging. The opposite is a diffuse immersed focus. Changing your focus to me more diffuse, being aware of all of your surroundings when you dance – not just you or your partner, but the audience, the room itself, the subtleties of the music. And integrating yourself with your observation and surroundings.

Take a round to practice your dancing with diffuse immersed focus.

Courage

Many of your fellow dancers will be rushing through their choreography. It will be distracting. It will take focus and courage to maintain your course, to do what is right for yourself in your own moment.

Strength

Strength in holding on to the moment. To resist the tension that surrounds us to do something. To work against it, to use it to our advantage. In acting, in general you deliver lines that someone else has written. The next line has already been determined, much like the next step in your choreography. But that doesn’t mean we should just deliver it. In Meisner technique acting there is a set of exercises to simply wait. Wait for tension to build before the line is delivered. How many people in our society wait for that moment of awkwardness when two people are alone. Often one person will say something just to break the tension of the moment. But what if you waited, let the tension build a bit more.

What if the next time you’re with your lover and your practiced this. Right before the kiss, you just waited, hovered inches away from their face. Stared into their eyes and paused. Your breath mixing with theirs in the space, feeling the warmth of their breath, letting the tension slowly build, letting the hairs start to stand on end.

We all know what is going to happen next. But the WHEN is now a question. If there’s enough tension then even the HOW and the IF start to come into question.

What if all your dancing, every moment of it, had that kind of magnetic power and tension. (For that matter what if all your lovers knew to do this…)

Visualization

People have a natural curiosity and wonder about what other people are thinking. We can tell right away when someone is just drifting or focused on something. What if you used that to your advantage. What if you thought about what that next moment would be. Picture it in your mind, let the natural tension between what you want and what exists now build.

Books to Read

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body (Book & CD)

Sanford Meisner on Acting