Posture! When we see that word, a lot of us spring to attention: lift our chests, through our shoulder blades back, our shoulders up, tighten our necks, suck in our bellies and raise our heads while attempting to “straighten our spines”. Proper posture, we think, is not-slouching; it’s also, apparently, waiting for a punch in the gut.

I’d argue that it isn’t even one universal thing. Posture, like fitness, is activity-specific. The posture that works for an activity depends on what matters most:
• what’s visually appealing
• what generates the most power or action
• what requires least extra effort to do, or is most efficient
• what’s least painful
• what’s most natural, and most sustainable

As a performer, I’ve learned a slightly different language to talk about the shape of the body: posture is a form we put on (perhaps a physical character, perhaps just a neutral, ready state); alignment is a practice of removing impediments to movement. Posture, then, is about presentation, the first half of that list. Alignment is about health, the second half. I find this differentiation handy in my own understanding of dance training.

Dancers spend a great deal of time adopting posture, and rarely train in alignment. Your body needs both to be your best possible performance vehicle. You can force dance posture and maaaaaybe get it right without first attending to your own alignment issues, but you’ll never have a truly neutral body to start with.

How to get aligned in three easy intentions

There are tons of techniques and practices that get you into good alignment – chiropractic and Rolfing try to bring you there from the outside, yoga and tai chi spend attention on this, many martial & modern dance traditions do, too – but there are a few schools of body work almost exclusively focused on you finding your own perfect alignment.

My favorite practice for understanding alignment is the Alexander Technique. You can read and try some exercises online [Try this list of self-study tools.], but these are the lessons in finding an easy, neutral, healthy alignment that I’ve taken from Alexander into dance. [Please note that I am not an Alexander instructor. I’m just a posture nerd and a performer. I recommend taking a class in this stuff so you can experience it firsthand.]

Part one. Your head. Alexander teachers tend to start with this litany. With a teacher, you’d intend these things mentally & then get gentle physical hints from their hands, but you can do this in your head, too.
1. My shoulders are free
2. So my head floats up and forward
3. And my neck follows

Alexander starts with the head in part because human development, at least of the spinal curve, starts with the head. [If you want to be super-nerdy, it’s the “cephalocaudal trend”, cousin to the “proximodistal trend”. We develop from the head down and from the spine out. Alexander also loved spines, and bones.]

Try it. Imagine your head is unbelievably light, a balloon on a string. Float it around on your neck a bit. My current Alexander teacher likes to remind us that our spines continue well up underneath our skulls – not in the back, mind you; we’ve got our heads on a nice little hingey floaty thing at the top of our necks.

Do as little as possible with your shoulders. Don’t hold your shoulders in any place – don’t shift your shoulder blades back, don’t push your shoulder socket down, just try to feel a sense that your shoulders are wide, deep, and released. Try letting your arms just hang at your sides; looking at yourself sideways in a mirror, they want to fall about halfway between your front & back.

And then check out your neck. Lots of us like to lift our chins crazy high and crunch the poor backs of our necks. Pretty hard to float our heads that way, though – and man, heads are heavy. You want to keep your giant head balanced on something nice and springy like your spine, not try to hold it up with the sheer strength of your neck and shoulder muscles.

One thing I love about Alexander is how gentle the practice is. It really inverts western conventional wisdom about posture, not just in the position of the body, but the way you arrive at those positions. Alexander is about gentleness, attending to what’s happening in the body and intending to release and align. No drill sergeants, no snaps to attention – just doing what you’re built to do. You needn’t even do this rigorously. Every time you draw your attention to the position of your spine with these intentions, you get a little more comfortable.

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Cross-posted from i'd like four tacos, please.

Not too much to do. Too much to reflect on. I’ll try.

Today: my third foray into Balla Guerra and first look at the combos that make up the vocabulary. I may have forgotten everything we did, but it’ll be in writing this week. It’s cool coming to these workshops with a fairly small group; no one seems set on being a Balla Guerra dancer exclusively, but I know each of these dancers well enough to excite my curiosity about what they will do with this new knowledge. Maybe we’ll all do something together?

I could talk about the brain overload that comes from workshops like this, but if you’ve been to one, you know… and if you haven’t, your experience will be different from mine. The knowledge that you keep after a workshop I think tells you a fair amount about what you love most in the material. If so, what I’m going to take away isn’t exactly the schemata or pantomime steps, but applying that stuff as a sort of theory of dance character development. I have ideas, is what I’m saying. BRILLIANT IDEAS.

I won’t tell you right away, because even though she thinks I broke up with her on the internet, Die gets to hear them first.

Also! I ordered myself a passel of dance instruction videos to help further my now-officially-365-days-of-dance efforts. More on that, too. Like I said, these are a couple of days too full of dance to share all at once.

Cross-posted from i'd like four tacos, please.

I’ve been rather quiet on this topic for the last several days. Not that I haven’t been working – just, it gets a little boring to report on my fairly routine training day after day. “Did same thing. Improved.” or “Did slightly different thing. Not feeling well.” kinds of updates don’t yield much insight for me. Getting stronger and better prepared is surprisingly the same, this year or 5 years ago.

Training does ignite flashes now and then, though. Friends were sharing beautiful videos to watch, too last week, which led me to spend some more time in study. And! There have been live dancing humans to observe tons this week!

I tend to take away from observation specific things I love and want to do or loathe & vow never to repeat. Seeing many dancers in rapid succession, though, I started to see a few things that stand out as differences between bad, good & brilliant dance; I was stuck by the consistent threads across performers of different genres and taste.

• Stillness. Every great performance I can think of exploits stillness, even if only tiny pauses, to pull you along with it. Bellydancers seem to make less use of stillness and silence than most performers (I suspect it’s for love of shimmies and rhythms that seem to ask for movement), but when we really get it, the results are striking. Dancers who know Johara, for instance, know how powerful it is to watch someone who can shimmy like a madperson just stop on stage for 5 seconds.
• OMG YOUR NECK! I tend to lift my chin somewhat ridiculously, which leaves a little tension in my neck – with the probably subconscious intent of being regal, I end up making my whole posture sloppy. I’ve been hyperaware of this in other dancers as I watch them, because having a poorly raised head and compressed neck (whether it’s from slouching or from delusions of grandeur) gives us all floppy noodle arms. [ETA: By the way, I saw video of myself later in the week that proves exactly this point. Poor soba noodle arms. You're going to Alexander class for sure now.]
• Extradaily posture matters. A lot. It doesn’t have to be any specific posture (case in point: Spoon, whose postural choices are varied and often far from bellydance convention), but assuming a dance “character” in your body infuses the whole performance with intent and focus. This week I also watched a series of videos of myself dancing (over the past 5 years or so) for the purpose of showing a colleague, and this is so very true for me – without ATS posture to fall back on, I fall apart. Schadenfreudian that I am, I feel much better having seen other good dancers look “meh” when they disregarded carriage.
• Caring and intent. Which are not dependent on having a Deep Inner Feeling. The performances I’ve most enjoyed recently – Cattleya, who I got to see live, or these videos I’ve watched and re-watched from Isidora Bushkovski (Izzy does that thing I mentioned with her neck, and is still so awesome to watch) and Asharah – share little but the dancers’ skill and passionate engagement in the performance.

Cross-posted from i'd like four tacos, please.

Why, hello, 5am. I did not expect to be meeting you here in the kitchen.

I remember (maybe wrongly) reading that perceived hunger is enough of a learned behavior that when you start or stop training your body has to relearn to be hungry for whatever you need. I vote we roll with this “science” no matter how bollocksy it is, since it explains why I woke up an hour ago so hungry I could not go on without this bowl of cereal.

Maybe after this I can go back to sleep?

We’ve remade my training room. It’s much improved – both over its most recent incarnation as an enormous storage closet for three people worth of stuff no one’s using and over its former life as an empty room with a matted floor. Plants. Mirrors. Places for stuff. A place to sit. It’s come to life in the past few days. Yesterday I hardly left it (and how awesome is it to get a day when I’m doing work-for-pay but also in my dance room doing that work?). Drills! So many drills! And then just dancing for fun.

Today I spent some more time in there, just doing ab work and loosening my hips. And then on to Erin’s sweet beginner Improv Tribal class. It is the best, coming to a beginner class after you’ve studied for awhile. She’s teaching technique so close to what I do but just different enough to need learning. The parts that are close make for more fun digging into the details of a step.

You rarely get to do that in classes if you’re pushing just ahead of what you already know. If I can find good dance classes, this is a thing I loved about traveling: you get to go back to basics. When I taught, people with intermediate levels of dance experience in utterly different styles often thought they should join an intermediate class. I’d like for them to know what I know now, Take the beginner class! Everyone’s basics are a bit different; some basics are a lot different. Coming back to the ground floor is valuable, for those differences and the new view they give of your own work. Best thing, though: the depth you can find in studying a technique when you’re not also dealing with the burden and thrill of learning it.

It’s exciting to be able to approach my whole body like that.

Cross-posted from i'd like four tacos, please.

This morning I got this week’s Slice of Life Project assignment (the first) in my email… and realized I need to charge my camera battery. Woe! [Not that much woe, really - it's a weeklong assignment. Due mainly to myself. Pretty sure I can charge a camera in that time.]

A fixed practice schedule is great for forcing you into the things you want to do, but the camera thing seems like a good metaphor for where I am physically today – hanging out with couple of twinges in places where I’m regaining flexibility.

So, today, I trade the regimen for chilling and recharging. And working on this choreography and that other show’s music.

Cross-posted from i'd like four tacos, please.

It feels artificial to start something just because it’s a new year. But! This date has lots of 1′s in it! Everyone knows you start with 1! Conveniently, I’ve only now gotten clear on a couple of intentions. They’re not resolutions. They’re not really goals at all, but they’re intents worth writing down.

These are they:

1. (because you start with it!) Live with a sense of balance between a sense of purpose, relationships with people, learning, and playing.
2. Be serious in my dance & physical training (not that I haven’t done this before, but I stopped, and now there’s a lot of ground to regain).
3. Become fearlessly compassionate with myself.
4. Stay (or get!) grounded, connected literally to the ground & in a gentle relationship with the natural/physical world.
5. Start this other website Rise Up Work to change the conversation about what work is and help people find more fulfillment in it. And eventually turn it into a source of independence and economic richness.

Each of those intents carries a ton of other things within it. That second one I feel compelled to write about each day – keeping a practice journal made a big difference when I did this before.

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Cross-posted from i'd like four tacos, please.