WhAT IS THIS

Students hear that I study dance and assume that my classes must be “dance classes” and they aren’t “dancers” so they couldn’t possibly! But dance is just movement, and movement has many languages - you could argue very well that all movement is dance, even the rising and falling of your chest as you breathe. Not everyone likes to look at it that way, and they don’t have to, but the truth is that if you want to move differently, you have to start thinking about movement differently.

As a dancer, I studied the classical western cannon of ballet, modern (Laban, Barteniff, some Graham, Cunningham, Limone), contemporary, improvisation, partner work, contact improvisation, and floorwork, while I’ve also dabbled in various forms of jazz, tap, ballroom, and latin.

How is any of that relevant?

To dance well, you have to understand the body, an area of study many people dedicate their entire lives to. It’s not enough to learn steps and positions; you have to look at why we have those steps and positions. Understanding your musculature helps you understand how to use the correct muscles to drive your movement, and it helps you know what to strengthen and stretch to move more efficiently. Investigating your bones means that you’ll be able to find your range of motion in any place in your body, because that range can be dictated by the shape or torque of your bones - you can stretch your legs as much as you want, but if you don’t understand how to shift your pelvis to get the maximum mobility of your femoral head as you hinge or unhinge, squat or straighten, then you’ll never get your splits.

And we have to go deeper than that! Why is movement so hard to understand, interpret, and replicate? Neurologically, it’s a different process from learning a concept out of a book. The nervous system dictates how we receive and interpret input, and it also dictates the output. If we focus on good input, generally we can get good output, even without worrying too much about replicating shapes.

Staying with the nervous system, we have to look at our movement patterning. Have you ever tried to walk homolaterally? With your right arm swinging forward as your right leg goes forward, and same with the left? Try it! It’s weird. Part of why it’s weird is the fact that, in our vertical axis, we need that cross-lateral motion to move efficiently, but part of it is because you’ve dug such a deep neural pathway that altering it feels unnatural and even impossible. Looking at how we pattern our movement means we can change it or reinforce it so we have availability in all directions.

Continuing to look at how we process and pattern movement, we have to look at how we’re interpreting our bodies and the space around us - how we perceive those factors will affect how we move!

Now, this is a site where you can access fitness and movement classes. It’s not a lecture or a Ted Talk or even the dreaded Ted X. You can read musings in the blog page, but I put out this philosophy so that you know in taking class that you have everything you need inside you already. You can change - you can become more coordinated, more flexible, stronger, smarter, even, in your bodily intelligence! But it will take time and work, and why not enjoy that time and work as much as we can?

I hear all the time from students that they’re worried about taking group classes because they think they’ll look silly, or that they don’t want to seem weak in front of others.

All of that is part of the process. You’re allowed to look silly, or seem weak, or miss a step, or put down your weights early. We are building bodily intelligence in ourselves along with all the strength and coordination and flexibility, but we can’t do that without research! Remember, failure is just information: you put your weight on the wrong foot, or aligned yourself in a sub-optimal way, or you didn’t move fast enough or slow enough, AND THAT’S FINE! NOW YOU KNOW and you can either look at ways to build up to where you failed, or you can see that’s your edge and you’ll go up to it but no further.

Movement is change. The universe is expanding, and the world is changing, and so are you. Let’s move together toward what we want.