Hip Socket, Hip Socket…

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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?