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

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

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

“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”

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?

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

 

Further Reading…

Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part

Mental Calisthenics

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.

Further Reading…

Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Muscle Chains

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.

 

Further Reading…

The Anatomy Trains