Different training techniques bring forth distinct qualities. Classical dance forms exist around the globe, including ballet, Bharatanatyam, and tango. Newer forms, such as modern dance at the turn of the twentieth century, reflect individualistic styles honed to create a particular aesthetic and to carry out a choreographic or performative vision. Most are deeply sourced in organic, natural laws and get codified so they can be passed on to others. Techniques in the history of American modern dance took this creative route, establishing training ground for dancers in their companies. The foundational styles of Martha Graham, José Limón, Lester Horton, Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, and Katherine Dunham are a few of the many techniques still in currency today.
Anatomy offers a clear starting point for understanding efficiency across stylistic boundaries. Effective training programs seek balance in the body systems—the skeletal, muscle, organ, neuroendocrine, fluid, and connective tissue systems that comprise our structure. Identifying overworked areas of strength and weaker areas that need support affects training choices. Rather than continually reinforce the known—and burn out those systems from overuse—it’s important to locate opportunities for growth. Timing has impact: sometimes we need lots of input; at other points it’s best to follow one track in depth, with space to integrate and inhabit the work.
Everything we learn feeds dancing. Particularly when investigating movement through creative work, expanding life experience provides something to dance about. Intellectual, intuitive, and emotional range can be as important to training as building physical strength, endurance, and coordination. For those who have danced since childhood, there’s sometimes a need to rehabilitate relationship to dance—moving beyond injuries and stressful memories. Easing off physical training and looking for new pathways can expand horizons, supporting an individualized voice and unique vision.
What I Look for in a Performer (Tamar Rogoff)
BODY INTELLIGENCE
The will to investigate and to be experimental within a new approach
SENSITIVITY AND SENSUALITY
The ability to focus on the origin and pathway of a movement and everything that surrounds it
FOCUS
Being in the moment so that the experiential senses can play and energize the next movement event
UNIQUENESS
Filtering movement and images through a distinct matrix of self
EXCITEMENT ABOUT THE PROCESS
A sense of how the particularities of performer and choreographer, when melded, can evoke the universal for the audience
Becoming a dancer takes time and happens in an instant. Thinking like a dancer requires dancing—putting in your time. Attend class, move, or create consistently. Then the body responds. It resets the resting length of muscles; lays down more calcium in bones; adjusts breathing patterns and blood flow; and maps new brain connections and coordinations. Dancing once a week begins these changes, refreshing vitality. But immersing yourself initiates more substantive shifts. Summer workshops, dancing eight or more hours a day for several weeks, offer a new baseline for embodiment. More cells wake up—there’s no turning back.
In this era, we are fortunate to have available many training techniques, somatic practices, and spiritual modes of inquiry. One of the challenges is choosing what’s useful and committing to a practice. Dancing plays multiple roles in one’s life: it channels sexual energy and personal drive; offers a sense of control over sometimes-chaotic life; engages intellectual curiosity in ways that academic subjects may not achieve; offers a sense of community and identity; details a full-bodied pathway to art making; and provides access to spiritual realms through rituals such as class and performance, and through sublime moments. Choosing what training will enhance one’s development requires personal discernment about values and desires.
Change feels awkward. It may not be easy to let go of “being right” or “looking good.” Some dancers need to release muscles, while others need to strengthen. Muscles that have lost their capacity for resiliency can restrict movement. Sometimes bodywork or massage is needed to support opening to the next threshold of capability, particularly if the fascia surrounding muscles and organs is stuck from intense training. Somatic practices such as bodywork, the Alexander Technique, or the discipline of Authentic Movement that focus on body awareness are good partners to dancing. With the right practitioner, a session every other week can add enormously to health and flexibility, extending the longevity of a career.
Some dancers are performers first, not classroom dancers. Distinguishing permeable membranes between warming-up, dancing, and performing is an embodied experience. Sometimes most of a class can be spent warming up to dancing; sometimes dancing begins the moment you walk in the door. Knowing the difference, whether in technique, set work, or improvisation, requires the fresh mind of engagement. Dancing is not like exercising on a treadmill while watching television, making the body dull. Instead, dancing trains an awake, engaged, and inquisitive mind. This is the training for dancing—showing up, being present, and opening to what might move through us in the moment.
STORIES
Dialing In
There’s distinction among movement forms, and there’s specificity within each form. A student offers the image of radio frequencies: you tune in to specific stations. For example, you can discern in your body between Authentic Movement and Butoh, or between Limón and Horton techniques. And there’s also getting clear reception—eliminating static or overlapping signals. Sometimes you can be dancing with someone in contact improvisation, but she doesn’t really understand weight. It’s not a clear signal.
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A yoga teacher is asked, “How do you know when you are a master practitioner of yoga?” He responds, “You do yoga every day for ten years, and if you miss a day, you start counting over.” This affirms my experience in dance: it took ten years of professional dancing after graduate school to begin to understand the nature of performance. You learn dance by dancing; it’s larger than your ideas.
Committed Practice
A biography of Michelangelo noted that the artist drew his own hand every morning. Trying this for a year, I learned that drawing is a skill—not just an endowed gift. Dancing is the same. Sometimes you are rehearsing a dance and don’t have the “chops” required. More endurance, arm strength, or attention to detail is necessary. That’s an invitation to expand your range: run, lift weights, or take ballet. Building your tool kit is part of training.
Pelvis showing hip joints
© Alan Kimara Dixon
TO DO
Hip Reflex
5 minutes
Reflexes are our fastest, most efficient movement pathways, providing the basis of efficient training in dance and martial arts.
Standing, imagine a hot floor, nail, or piece of glass stimulating the sole of your foot. Notice the automatic reflex to flex the leg, folding hip, knee, and ankle simultaneously upward and inward toward center. This initiation is from the iliopsoas, integrating spine and leg—the fastest neuromuscular pattern for survival, and basic to martial arts training.
• Experience the hip reflex several