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Let's go. Up. Yes, feel your arms and go up. Good and... Lovely you guys. Go up.
That's hard isn't it because your feet are doing this really percussive thing. I'm asking
you to change the tempo of you arms.
Once your foundation and then you have to be able to sort of coordinate that other stuff on top.
I teach a low-intermediate modern dance class. Our goal is to give students an opportunity
to learn about the historical dance techniques, as well as the more contemporary ones.
From the top begin again dropping one, two, three, suspend, and make sure you're breathing, and elongate.
I start out with the Jose Limon technique and that was developed by a Mexican-American
choreographer/teacher starting in the 1950s, and I like to start with that technique because
in some ways it is the most lyrical of the techniques and the easiest for people to start
to understand some of the fundamentals.
We're doing a lot of releasing and just a lot of like dropping and movement and focus
on where the movement comes from, and reaching and maybe on the brink of falling, and then
catching yourself. It's really about pushing your boundaries.
Some of the hardest things about modern dance are really being aware of your body because
there's so much letting go you really need to be aware of where everything should be
when you do a certain movement.
And that can all be done if you can understand the fundamentals of the anatomy and the alignment.
So you want to feel that there's elongation in the arms and that there's a sense of separation
in between your knees. Yes, there, yes. So you want to feel like your knees are separating,
your arms are separating, it's like you're on a rack. There you go. So from that how
to get on to the next thing.
She like can really help you with images and just funny little pictures to help you dance better.
I remember studying ideokinesis, the premise being that if you can give your mind an image,
your central nervous system will interpret that and tell the muscles what they need to do.
The difference between a river ferry and an ocean ferry is the ocean ferry is designed
so that when it goes up and over it goes slowly so you don't get seasick, and a river ferry
doesn't have that so it just does this. So you want to think that there are times that
it really has to have that sense of lollygagging rather than doing a quick upright.
Micki understands of course that technique is important and that you need to be able
to do a plie or a tondu, but that dance is really about letting go and dancing and feeling
good about it.
I recognize that these students aren't necessarily going to go on be professional dancers, but
they will become dance enthusiasts. They'll find connections with whatever it is that
they do in their life, and maybe they'll find a way to integrate it and that all of this
information can be applied wherever they end up.