TIPS: Making the Most of Your Classroom Experience (by Mirah Ammal )

Good tips, with the bellydance student in mind...

Maybe you've just started taking dance, or maybe you've been studying for years, but in any case, you've decided to brave the exciting world of group dance classes. How can you make the most of your classes and see improvement in your dancing? A few important tips:

1) Pay attention what your instructor says to the whole class. Treat corrections or clarifications directed at the group as though they could be directed at you personally, and look for ways to adjust your own body/dancing. Generally, in a group class if an instructor makes a broad comment, it means that many or all of the people in the room can use hearing it (some to a greater extent, but most everyone can get something out of it.)

2) Develop a thick skin. When your instructor corrects you, she’s not picking on you. She’s trying to help you get better! Sometimes she may be trying to help you correct a critical flaw, but sometimes, she may see you’re very close to getting something well and she’s trying to help push you to the next plane. It’s hard to take correction or criticism, but it’s the only way we can get better. Avoid making excuses, and ask for clarification if you're not sure what she's telling you.

3) Seek out feedback. Ok, so now you’ve worked on thickening that skin…now ask for the tough feedback. Don’t just fish for compliments, actually ask to know how something is going and (if you’re ready for it) let the instructor know you’d appreciate her honest assessment. (Remember, not everyone takes feedback well, so your instructor may be a little nervous about hurting students' feelings or angering people. Letting her know you *want* honest feedback lets her know she can give it to you, and that helps you get better.)

4) Avoid moving up a level for social or ego reasons. Be sure your technique development matches your class level. When in doubt, ask your instructor’s opinion. Also, when moving up, consider taking two classes simultaneously for a session or two—one at the lower level (where you feel confident and can continue to really master techniques)—and one at the higher level where you will feel challenged. This is good for your technique, and it can help for you emotionally. When you move up to the next level—to a class populated at least in part with people who’ve taken that level before—you may feel clumsy, awkward all over again. But in your old class, you’re the old pro.

5) Try not to compare yourself with others. Everyone comes to the dance with a different set of experiences, different strengths, and a different biology. Every dancer had her movements she struggled to get, and some that came to her easily. Be patient, give yourself permission to not be perfect right away, and remember, it's not a contest.

6) Train your eye for detailed observation. Train your eye to watch movement carefully. Notice where your instructor places her weight. Which muscles are working and which are relaxed? What are her hands, feet, arms and hips doing? And how is what you're doing similar or different? Being able to observe the details and observe specifically what you need to correct in your movement is the first step toward being able to do the movement properly.

7) Recognize that the darkest hour is often right before dawn. Sometimes you’ll hit plateaus where you feel like you’re not moving forward quickly or at all. That’s ok. We all go through periods of this. Also, recognizing what you’re doing wrong is a huge step toward being able to do it right. So, when you see what you’re doing wrong but your body won’t correct it just yet, don’t despair and don’t give up—change is coming!

8) Practice ALWAYS! Practice in the shower, the office, the grocery store, or anywhere you go. Not all practice needs to be a serious 60 minute concentration session. The shower is an excellent place to practice your undulations. Pumping gas? You can get several minutes of shimmy practice! Waiting on line at the grocery story? Dainty hip-drops! Alone in the bathroom at work? Three-quarter shimmy and Tunisians! Look for little moments throughout the day when you can practice the moves you're working on. A few seconds here and there (tummy flutters on a conference call….) can help you get better, and can give you a lift during the day. (Note: if you're too weirded out to dance at your own local grocery store, go to the Chicago Ave. Kowalski's in Minneapolis. They're used to it by now.)

9) If you don’t know what the most important parts of a movement are, ask. I once substituted for a Level 1 class that was working on a choreography. They were doing very well, but at one point in the dance, the ladies did something I can only describe as "the chicken walk". I watched, baffled, for several moments. Then it hit me. Their instructor had shown them a walking movement…but they'd focused on her kicked-up foot (a particular stylization of hers), not the "core" of the movement (which was in the core of the body). They were so focused on this stylization that they had missed the actual movement entirely! It was an understandable error (and easily fixed), but it serves to illustrate the point—recognize what the important parts of a movement are, and what is just optional stylization. You'll never be worse off for asking, and one question might prevent hours of public chicken-walking.

10) Take classes from more than one instructor. Of course you'll develop a taste for your favorite instructor and it's good to have a primary relationship, but if there's more than one instructor in your area, take advantage of your good fortune! Different teachers have different styles and methods, and you can learn from them all. Plus, sometimes you can hear the same comment 500 times from one instructor, but simply hearing it in a different voice makes it hit home. So challenge yourself to try out someone in addition to your regular instructor (and be wary of instructors who don't want you to go to anyone else!)

(c) Mirah Ammal, 2006

Source: Mirah Ammal's website

DANCE CLASS: The moves, the story, when it's OK to boo

Sid Smith Special to the Tribune
October 16, 2009

Am I watching a story or not? What if I like the flashy parts best? And what's an arabesque and why? Dance newcomer Christopher Borrelli has questions, critic Sid Smith has answers. For a quick lesson on an intimidating art form, read on.


Dance can often strike the newcomer -- especially the male newcomer -- as among the most mysterious and intimidating of art forms.

Tribune reporter Christopher Borrelli, a devotee of cinema and other pop arts, is dating a woman who's a passionate dance fan. This means he has the luck/misfortune of being escorted/dragged to all manner of serious dance concerts. Recently, he questioned out loud what exactly it was he was seeing, what he should look for and what he was missing. With Lar Lubovitch's ballet "Othello" in production through Oct. 25 by the Joffrey Ballet at the Auditorium Theatre, now is a fine time to answer.

1. The question that nags at me whenever I sit through dance is one of narrative. Should I be able to understand the narrative from the dance itself? And if I can't follow the story, am I watching lousy dance? Or is the narrative in a dance closer to, say, the existentialism in a film -- inferred instead of literal?
All of the above. Older dance, like older films, conforms to our conventional Western idea of narrative -- 19th century ballets such as "Swan Lake," "Giselle" and "The Nutcracker" tell clear-cut stories through mime and dance, often in ways that are precursors of silent movies.

But in the 20th century, dance, like other art forms, became increasingly abstract, so that by the time of choreographers George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham and many others in midcentury, dance became a kind of abstract painting in motion. But if there is a story, like "Swan Lake" or " Cinderella," the dance should tell it clearly, and some do this better than others. "Giselle" is a great yarn. "The Nutcracker" is a fairly lousy, muddied one. Dance can provide a great love story like "Casablanca" or an open-ended, mystifying one like the 1960 Italian film "L'avventura." In general, storytelling in dance is more sophisticated now, sharper in "Othello," Joffrey Ballet artistic director Ashley Wheater argues, than in those old 19th century war horses.

2. What is an arabesque? I think I know. But more importantly, why should I care what it is?
Ballet is an assortment of sophisticated techniques and poses developed over centuries, as sublime as yoga and at times as cruel as foot-binding. Every single dancer masters them differently, on a sliding scale, like judo practitioners or kick-boxers.

In an arabesque (there's actually a variety of them), the dancer stands on one leg, while the other leg extends away from the body, with hands, arms, neck and head held in an artful design.

"What you care about in an arabesque is the beauty of the line," Wheater says. "Look from the end of a ballerina's fingertips all the way to the end of her toes in her point shoes, and from the top of her head to the base line of her standing leg. There should be a stunningly beautiful line, like one you might see in a building by a master architect. And it's the simplicity of the line that's beautiful, a simplicity developed through years of training.

"For a woman in particular, you must have an arabesque. You can't be a dancer without it."

3. The handful of times I have attended dance, I inevitably relate better to the unusual -- a piece that feels modern and pop culture-like or simply weird -- than to the elegance and poise of classic dance. Is something wrong with me?
"No," answers Wheater, "the weird and unusual are a reflection of our time right now. In theater and opera, too, people are breaking the boundaries of traditional ideas because it's intriguing. But don't forget it's the line and simplicity of classical ballet that's actually the hardest to achieve."

4. If I can hear the dancer's feet hit the stage, even with a soft thud, which is inevitable, are they doing something wrong? Should I boo loudly?
"Ballet is a silent art form, sublimely married to the music," Wheater says. "When you hear a lot of hard-hitting point shoes, the ladies in the company have not been taught how to soften the noise properly." Ditto a man landing loudly after a leap. Meanwhile, booing is a cherished European response, less so in America. But it was famously employed recently at the opening of the opera "Tosca" in New York City.

"If you have negative reaction to an overall work or interpretation, by all means boo," Wheater says. "Booing loud toe shoes might be a bit extreme, however."

5. Is a graceful move more important than an athletically difficult move? Or is it vice versa?
Both are paramount. Technical fireworks give ballet its circus excitement; beauty, elegance and poignancy give it its soul. In cinema, the montage in "The Battleship Potemkin," the marathon tracking shots in Hitchcock's "Rope" and the filmic cornucopia in "Citizen Kane" dazzle us.

The artfully sketched fallibility in "The Graduate," the bittersweet finales to "Casablanca" or "Rain Man." Who'd dismiss any of them?

6. The last time I attended dance -- Bill T. Jones' Lincoln piece at the Ravinia Festival -- I liked it more than most people around me, who seemed mystified by it. I was responding, I think, to the dialogue, the theatricality, the sheer spectacle of the thing. But does this mean, when it comes to dance, I am like a child who responds better to shiny objects?
It means you're bringing your instincts and paying attention. Jones is a fascinating hybrid figure of postmodern dance, grafting unusual amounts of dialogue, drama, historical fact and biography into much of his work. Dance-theater is a good way to describe his approach, and he makes a great introduction for the dance novice. His Lincoln piece (last month's premiere of "Fondly Do We Hope ... Fervently Do We Pray") wasn't among his finest, possibly explaining nearby audience indifference. But his genius for multi-disciplines is attracting new fans and new understanding of dance. Welcome to the club.

Tribune reporter Christopher Borrelli contributed to this report.

Source: Chicago Tribune

An urban dance degree was the right move for UEL

by Rachel Williams
published in The Guardian, Tuesday 27 October 2009

East London's urban dance degree is booming in popularity, despite the criticisms of purists

Justin Gordon started dancing at the age of seven, entertaining family members with his reggae and soul moves at an endless succession of birthdays, weddings and christenings in Tottenham, north London.

"My family used to have a lot of parties," he remembers. "You either sang, or you danced."

Jessica O'Shea feels like she's been dancing all her life ("Your body just moves and you like the way it moves so you always do it"), but growing up in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, there was nowhere to learn the sort of street styles that intrigued her, until she and her friends secured funding for their own practice space.

At around the same time, a nine-year-old Annabelle Satchwell was donning embarrassing outfits to enter disco dancing competitions in Luton; in Presteigne, among the lonely hills of the Welsh Marches, Betty Adesanya was being taught ballet, modern and jazz; and in her bedroom in Hackney, east London, Christine Seraphin and her cousins were making up routines to show to their parents.

More than a decade later, put off traditional dance degrees, with their heavy focus on ballet and contemporary, by what they saw as their stuffiness and limited scope, the five were among 12 students who signed up for the first year of the UK's only urban dance undergraduate course, then newly launched at the University of East London.

Here, they are taught not just hip-hop styles like krumping, popping and locking, but also the fundamentals of African dance, capoeira and kathak, a classical Indian discipline.

Purists have turned their noses up at the course, but, now in its third year, its popularity is booming.

UEL claims it is the fastest-growing dance degree in the country: its intake has risen six-fold since it began, and this year more than 300 applicants battled it out for 75 places. During clearing, staff were inundated with calls asking if there were any spaces. A note on the whiteboard above them, as if they needed it, reminded them that there definitely were not.

Senior lecturer Kate Sicchio, a Philadelphian who has been in the UK for five years, explains: "Students are really interested in getting more than one dance style and that it's different from normal contemporary training: hip-hop one day, kathak another. They really appreciate that."

Some within the sector are supportive, but there is inevitable scepticism.

"It's a bit surprising to other HE institutions," Sicchio says. "There are quite a few who find it shocking. They say 'you teach street dance in university, how does that work?' And you say, 'well there's a history and contextual study just as much as in traditional techniques'. And you can actually talk to these artists, because they're still alive and producing work."

The course was born as UEL looked to expand its performing arts institute with a dance degree, and decided that rather than compete in a market saturated with big names, it should offer something a bit different. It took inspiration from its local area. "Rather than setting up a contemporary dance degree, they actually looked to the community and built a degree bottom-up," says Sicchio.

The decision was also based on the philosophy that popular art forms should be more swiftly adopted.

"Academia is always quite slow to wake up to innovation," says Mark O'Thomas, the director of UEL's institute for performing arts development. "It didn't even recognise jazz until relatively late. We felt urban and global dance, the dance that young people are interested in, had no validity at all [in the mainstream]."

Sicchio believes other institutions are less in tune with their students and their target audience. "A lot of them are upset when a lot of their students' knowledge comes from TV programmes that are really popular, but we find that as a way in. If you're really interested in this one style of dance, let's trace it, let's find the history, and how can we blend it with other things to make it even more new and fresh."

In their new studios at Trinity Buoy Wharf, where the perpetually mud-brown waters of the River Lea meet the Essex-bound Thames, Sicchio's students are equally enthusiastic.

Many have BTec national diplomas in dance or performing arts, others have A-levels and some are self-taught. All must audition for a place and take a written test to ensure they will be able to cope with the academic side of the course.

The group of eight third-years show off their skills with a display of freestyling, whooping and clapping each other as they take it in turns to dance solo in front of the group to a soundtrack that runs from Beggin' by Madcon to New Kids On The Block's You Got It (The Right Stuff).

Resting on the studio's sprung floor afterwards, they agree unanimously that their different backgrounds, socially, geographically and in terms of favourite dance styles, make the experience of learning all the richer.

"Because everyone's so different dance-wise, everyone's more open to everyone's ideas and opinions, whereas in traditional ballet everyone's a bit snobbish, I think," says Monique Alleyne, 21.

Seraphin adds: "Contemporary and ballet were something you'd do in a dance school, street was something you'd do in classes. To be able to be on a degree where you're actually studying it, it's quite amazing, actually."

Preet Kaur raves about the variety of styles on offer. "African is about using your whole body: your chest, your back, your legs, your head, everything."

Adesanya, who transferred to UEL after one year of a more traditional dance degree, says the way the students learn from each other is crucial. "I felt like other courses or classes I went to were quite restricting. I wanted to fuse contemporary with other styles.

"Here, it's completely different, it lets you express yourself as an artist more. You're learning so many different styles, you can really develop your own style and flavour and way of dancing. And they respect that as well, which is nice. I think in five years' time everyone will want to come here."

Sicchio says the course is still finding its feet, but believes it could set a precedent for the future as employers demand more diversity from dancers.
"Some people think you must train in one technique and have your core built up. But I think it's about the individual student and not making this cookie-cutter dancer that so many institutions are interested in," she says. "It's really about finding individuals and making them shine."

Source: guardian.co.uk

An Introduction to Belly Dance

Published: February 03, 2007
Writer: Nadia De Leon

Authentic Belly Dance is not the deceptive immoral dance of seduction that western Hollywood-influenced stereotypes would have us believe. Belly Dance has been misrepresented by cabaret dancers and incorrectly portrayed to the public by the media. In reality, Belly Dance is a natural, earthly, beneficial, enjoyable and completely ethical dance that honors women and femininity. The proper term for this dance, which can both be a highly disciplined art as well as a form of casual exercise and entertainment, is Oriental Dance. The first American teachers disliked the word "belly dance" because of its wrong sexual connotation and focus on the women's torsos and not on their dancing technique. In her article Roots the well-known and respected teacher Morocco (Carolina Vargas Dinicu), who has more than thirty years studying, performing and teaching Belly Dance, states: "To use the disgusting misnomer 'belly dance' is not only incorrect, it is an insult equivalent to calling Flamenco 'cockroach killing'"[1]. Nowadays, the term Belly Dance has been accepted by many teachers and reclaimed by new dancers because the body part where the movements are focused is, indeed, the belly. And this has nothing to do with a seductive goal; in fact, it has to do with fertility.

Many dance scholars support a theory that places Belly Dance as the oldest dance in the history of humanity, stating that it originated as a fertility ritual thousands of years ago. They use as evidence for their theory 17,000 years-old rock engravings found in southern Italy, Greece and Egypt, as well as famous fertility goddesses/ women sculptures such as the Venus of Willendorf. Furthermore, some dance researchers, such as dancer, writer and editor Daniella Gioseffi in her book Earth Dancing, claim that Belly Dancing was originally a ritual form for the Mother Earth Goddess in primal matriarchal or polytheistic societies where the dance honored femininity and was passed down from mothers to daughters.

Another important theory about the origin of Belly Dance is the one based on its childbirth facilitation and training capabilities. Several dancers including the famed dance ethnologist La Meri, who traveled extensively throughout the Middle East for research and training purposes in the '20s and '30s, claim to have witnessed rituals in which a woman in labor is surrounded by other women who perform Belly Dancing in a sort of hypnotizing ritual for moral support.

Belly Dancing arrived to America as an imported cabaret spectacle referred to as Danse du ventre, which originated in the Middle East during the colonization of Africa by European countries. Referring to this degradation process, the Armenian dancer

Armen Ohanian states in her book The Dancer of Shamahka:

Thus in Cairo one evening I saw, with sick incredulous eyes, one of our most sacred dances degraded into a bestiality horrible and revolting. It is our poem of the mystery and pain of motherhood, which all true Asiatic men watch with reverence and humility, in the far corners of Asia where the destructive breath of the Occident has not yet penetrated. In this olden Asia, which has kept the dance in its primitive purity, it represents maternity, the mysterious conception of life, the suffering and the joy with which a new soul is brought in the world. Could any man born of woman contemplate this most holy subject, expressed in an art so pure and so ritualistic as our eastern dance, with less than profound reverence? Such is our Asiatic veneration of motherhood, that there are countries and tribes whose most sacred oath is sworn upon the stomach, because it is from this sacred cup that humanity has issued. But the spirit of the Occident had touched this holy dance, and it became the horrible 'danse du ventre' I heard the lean Europeans chuckling, I saw lascivious smiles upon even the lips of Asiatics, and I fled.

Even today in some Middle Eastern regions that remain unaffected by the influence of Western ways of thinking, women dance in a circle around a mother in labor to induce her to repeat the movements and to give her the psychological support showed in the live-giving gift in every woman's destiny. In the informal and familial settings of some Muslim societies, women still gather by themselves in a separate location to dance to the rhythms of the drums, have fun and interact. This traditional form of Belly Dance is called Raks-sharki. Nevertheless, in most of the Middle East the rise of Political Islam has led to more puritanical attitudes in general. Dancers who appear in public, dancing in front of men who are not family to them contradict orthodox Islamic values. As a result, the widely held notion that professional dancers are prostitutes is being reinforced through the Arab countries, from Afghanistan to Morocco. In Egypt the rise of Political Islam is creating a backlash against Belly Dance. By law, in the country that names itself as the place where Belly Dance was born, these dancers cannot dance in television, and police monitors live performances to ensure that the dancer's skirt ends below the knee and that the navel is covered, even if only with transparent material.[2]

These attitudes might sound opposite to our values of freedom and free will, but they are actually understandable given Arab religious and cultural values. Therefore, what I find strange is that here in the U.S. dancing Belly Dance could be a cause to suffer the weight of many prejudices. Dance should be respected as a universal language that allows us to better understand the cultures of others. The fact is, it is impossible to even try understanding cultures different to ours, or widen our concepts in general, if we do not start with an open mind that does not judge dances by the amount of clothes wore by the dancers instead of the cultural meaning attached to them. Once again, the dancer Morocco states this indignation in wonderful words in her article Roots:

When I first came into Oriental dance (...), I was drawn by the beauty of its music and movements and gave no thought to the possibility that it might be misinterpreted by ignorant or misinformed viewers. Innocent that I was, I assumed that the grace of a skilled dancer was sufficient to prove the beauty and legitimacy of this ancient art form. How wrong I was! I've lost count of the times that an erroneous and degrading value judgment of my morality and worthiness was made, based on (...) previous performances of those who, in every profession, cater to the lowest common denominator.[3]

The truth is that Belly dance does not only have many physiological benefits (including good posture, muscular strength, coordination, cardiovascular fitness, eases menstrual pains, improves circulation and digestion, and releases tension), it also has several psychological benefits. Most importantly, it improves self-image and confidence, which is a very important benefit, especially for young women. Belly Dance lets us get in contact with our body and accept it as it is. Belly Dance makes any thin or overweight woman enjoy feminine dancing. This acceptance of ourselves in front of the mirror image as much as in front of other people is more easily achieved in an "only girls" atmosphere. That's why many Belly Dance teachers, including myself, don't even aloud men in their studios. Second, Belly Dance also develops teamwork and a deep feeling of sisterhood among the members of a "dancing troupe". Tribal Belly Dance is danced in couples or larger groups where dance is improvised by the "cue-er", who is the woman on the front left corner. This title is shared because of the rotation of positions, resulting in a group dynamic in which the higher level of team work is reached with the synchronicity of the dancers.

Belly Dance can be a way of life, or something a woman does "just for kicks every other Friday night", but it is always beneficial to the women who practice it. Belly Dance has a way of seducing us, women, into the quest for the light of our own feminine identity, as well as constructing a place of belonging for that identity, in history, in society, regardless of the time, place and culture we come from. Belly Dance invokes and evokes the universal energy of womanhood from the astral collective consciousness into our striking present, into our sweat and skin, the tips of our fingers, and the rhythm of our hearts beating life.

[1] Vargas Dinicu, Carolina (Morocco), Roots, Habibi Vol.5 No.12

[2] Nieuwkerk, Karin van, A trade like any other: female singers and dancers in Egypt, Austin : University of Texas Press, 1995.

[3] Vargas Dinicu, Carolina (Morocco), Roots, Habibi Vol.5 No.12

Source: Associated Content

Greenville High's Jernigan uses dance to teach art

By Kathryn McKenzie, City People Writer
Published: May 7, 2008


It's hard for Hilary Jernigan to hide her love for art.

"I knew as a freshman in high school that I wanted to be an artist," she says. "My passion was in art."

Jernigan teaches art I, II, III and IV at Greenville High School and is a working artist herself. Much of her personal love for what she does is shared with her students by showing them the endless possibilities and variations that art can bring.

"I'm a non-representational artist. A lot of my work is purely compositional. It doesn't have subject matter," Jernigan says. Non-representational art focuses on shape, color and space.

To incorporate her medium and to help the students grasp the concept of non-representational art, Jernigan brought in another art form into the classroom -- dance. Jernigan says that with the help of dance, the students were able to see the pure concepts of composition.

"I have real passion for modern dance," she says. "So overlapping those two concepts was to me, very natural ... and I wanted the students to see composition in modern dance and composition in modern art is very similar."

To teach the concept of compositional art, Jernigan paired up with a teacher from the Fine Arts Center, Jan Woodward, to teach a unit on dance and art.

"The kids drew from watching the dancers," Jernigan says. "We sent artwork over to the Fine Arts Center and the dancers created some original choreography off of the artwork. Then when we got together, they did the dance for us and the students continued to work off of the dancers choreography, so it was a reciprocal process."

There's always an aesthetic beauty to Jernigan's medium and she recognized that about dance, as well. Both art forms deal with shapes. "It's all about shape, a lot of positive and negative space," she says. "Dance is a composition that's always changing and moving. After college, as my work began to mature more, I began to see that relationship.

"The first time I really saw wonderful modern dance was when I watched Alvin Ailey's dance company, " she says. "The composition was so moving and shocking. It's three-dimensional art constantly changing, it's kinetic art."

Source: GreenVilleOnline.com

Achieving the Ideal Bellydance Posture

by Cinthia (??)
published: Sept 22, 2006 (??)

For all of you aspiring belly dancers out there: here’s how to improve your dance posture and get everyone’s attention.

Stand up with your back against a wall. Lift your chest, keeping your shoulders down and your neck stretched tall. Your feet should be hip-width apart with the back of your heels touching the wall. Bend your knees (and keep them bent no matter what!) Keep your upper back resting against the wall.

Now, the key part: take one of your hand and slide it behind you in the small of your lower back. It is very likely that you’ve got a gap between your hand and the wall, which means that you are arching and need to align your lower back against the wall. If your hand can’t fit in there because your entire back is touching the wall, congratulations, you’ve got the straight back fundamental for the ideal belly dancing posture

How to align your lower back against the wall:

Put your hand on your tailbone (coccyx) and push down on it until your pelvis tilts away from the wall and every vertebrae in your back has contact with the wall. Notice that keeping your knees nicely bent helps a lot! Remember to keep your upper back to the wall as you do this so that you are not bending your upper body forward.

Also, the chest should remain lifted and the weight of the shoulders pushed down until you feel some resistance in your back. The lift of the rib cage will bring strong opposition from your back muscles, which are pulling down. You know you are doing this right when you start to feel some tension on your lats (muscles right below the shoulder blades). If you feel your lats pulling down and lengthening, it’s working, girls (and boys)! After all this hard work, the persistent arch should have disappeared - or gradually be disappearing - by now. You may not get there for a while, but the more you push your body, the closer you’ll get to your goal. Keep pushing!

If you think you’ve got it, let yourself get used to the feeling of a straight back, bent knees and a lifted upper body. Hold the position and then slowly release. Pay attention to your body’s natural tendency to arch. Repeat over and over until you start to get a feel of what your muscles have to do each time in order to make the right posture happen. It may feel unnatural and stiff, but once you practice keeping this posture at all times, you will eventually get used to it and it will become second nature.

I assure you, getting this posture right will give you a totally different look as a dancer. When you are able to hold yourself like this, you will not only be able to command attention easily on the dance floor, but you will also have better control of most belly dancing movements and steps, including spins and turns (where a straight back is absolutely essential). And last but not least, once you get comfortable with your new posture, getting into it will immediately make you feel more confident about yourself and about your dancing.

Good luck!!

Source: Wannabe Nothing

P/S: She's not a pro or teacher, but I just wanna save this here to read later.

Learning to Dance, One Chunk at a Time

By DIANE SOLWAY
Published: May 27, 2007

LAST month in a studio at American Ballet Theater, Angel Corella was studying the former Ballet Theater star Gelsey Kirkland as she showed him sequences from the second act of “The Sleeping Beauty,” a new production set to have its premiere this week at the Metropolitan Opera House.

One of the world’s finest dancers, whose powerhouse technique and dramatic intensity propelled him from his native Spain to American Ballet Theater when he was still a teenager, Mr. Corella also has a rare, less visible gift: he is able to reproduce a dance simply by seeing it once — not only his part, but everybody else’s too. After observing Ms. Kirkland, he was soon following behind her, humming as he mirrored her movements. Forty minutes after they began, he had the hundreds of steps down cold.

But for Mr. Corella and the other Ballet Theater dancers, knowing the steps of a dance is just the first phase in perfecting it. They must also convey the intention and feeling of the works they perform, which, in a repertory company like theirs, run from classical to modern to brand new. During the 2006-7 season alone, the dancers have rotated regularly through 21 works by choreographers as varied as Marius Petipa, Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp and Lar Lubovitch.

That dancers can remember such a wide range of steps, roles and styles is sometimes forgotten in the awe produced by a great performance; the seeming effortlessness of it all suggests that each phrase and combination is spontaneous and not a memorized series of steps. But in getting to that point, most dancers share a relatively similar path, first learning the choreography and then adding layers of detail and color. Finally, they absorb the work so completely that its elements literally become automatic, leaving the dancer’s brain free to focus on the moment-by-moment nuances of the performance.

Dancers call it muscle memory. And while it obviously manifests itself physically as far as dance is concerned, what actually happens, according to neuroscientists, is that the movements become thoroughly mapped in the brain, creating a shorthand between thinking and doing. We may speak of a musician’s fingers or a winemaker’s nose, yet the resulting product is all the brain’s doing, explained Daniel Glaser, a neuroscientist who works at the Wellcome Trust, a philanthropic organization devoted to health care based in London. “Of course you need a body to dance,” he said. “But as dancers transition from conscious awareness of a newly acquired routine to the automatic performance of it, the brain is not doing any less work.”

Dr. Glaser is one of a handful of neuroscientists who have studied dancers as a way to understand the body’s relationship to the brain, and vice versa, better. Because classical ballet relies on certain discrete movements that a dancer must repeat thousands of time throughout a career, the brains of dancers, it turns out, are exquisitely sensitive to seeing movements they’ve rehearsed. If they see someone performing an arabesque, for example, certain motor areas of their brains respond as if they were themselves performing the step.

But before they get anywhere near muscle memory, dancers must first, as they like to say, get the dance into their bodies. This was uppermost in the minds of Ballet Theater’s dancers last month as they prepared for the current Met season. Some were learning new roles; others were refreshing their memory of works they had already performed.

In one studio, Marcelo Gomes led David Hallberg, the company’s newest principal dancer, and his fellow principal Gillian Murphy through their opening entrance and the pas de deux from Ashton’s one-act “The Dream.” The pair were to play the regal fairies Oberon and Titania, and Mr. Gomes, who has danced only Oberon, knew both parts. As they followed behind him, sketching his moves, Mr. Gomes gave a master class in cognitive learning — or so it seemed to an outsider.

First he demonstrated each role, calling out verbal cues (“You look at the moon”), ballet positions (“Put her in fourth”) and movements (“You’re doing bourrées and saying ‘no’ at the same time”), and then described in more detail the impetus for the movement (“As you back up, you’re scheming, and we see it on your face”), all the while humming the Mendelssohn score and counting the beats (“One and two and three, tee-ta-tee-ta-tee”).

Within the hour they had learned most of it. The next day they rehearsed with the ballet mistress, Georgina Parkinson, adjusting movements as she called out visual images and described the intention of a particular moment. The 10-minute duet requires great stamina, and the quality of any step can vary depending on its speed and texture: fast, slow, honey or molasses.

Ms. Parkinson wanted to see more lushness and amplitude in the lovers’ sensual choreography. “You need to explode,” she told Ms. Murphy, advising her to rely more on her back muscles as she flitted her arms madly about. Mr. Hallberg, who does not have Mr. Corella’s gift of being able to learn steps from sight alone, looked on. “It’s not in my body yet,” he said. “I’m just trying to get the feeling of it.”

Where initially dancers see one move and then another, eventually they merge the steps into phrases and then into longer sequences. Brain scientists refer to this process as “chunking.” Dr. Glaser likens it to learning to tie a shoelace. First you think “left over right, right under left,” and then you make a bow. But once you’ve learned the steps, they become one seamless movement.

“What dancers are able to do, which you and I cannot,” he said, “is to take a set of those moves and turn that into one long phrase and then take a dozen of those phrases and put them into one long movement.”

Karen Bradley, a movement analyst who directs the graduate dance program at the University of Maryland, said: “No two dancers chunk the same way. Some do it rhythmically, some consider spatial configurations, some think about weight shifts, some rely on imagery, and some follow an inner monologue.”

After his third rehearsal for “The Dream” — about three hours of studio time — Mr. Hallberg could run through the pas de deux with Ms. Murphy nonstop. “This means that it’s not only in the body,” he said. “But it’s nowhere near performance value. Now you can add yourself into the performance.”

For that, the dancers rely on Ballet Theater’s coaches, many of whom have danced the works themselves and can help the dancers create a performance that resonates with an audience.

That was the lesson the ballet mistress Irina Kolpakova was trying to impart last month to Mr. Gomes and Veronika Part, the opening-night leads in the new production of “Sleeping Beauty,” staged by Ms. Kirkland; Kevin McKenzie, the company’s artistic director; and Michael Chernov, with choreography after Petipa. A former Kirov ballerina and celebrated Princess Aurora, Ms. Kolpakova, 74, frowned as she watched the pair run through their pas de deux. “It’s very nice, but where is your feeling?” she asked, and then demonstrated what she wanted. Following behind her, the younger dancers were all taut, sinewy limbs and unlined faces; it was in Ms. Kolpakova’s expressive face and articulate phrasing that the choreography came alive.

“You work your muscle memory in rehearsal so that when you get onstage it’s only your brain and your emotions working,” Mr. Corella said. “You don’t think about what the body is doing anymore. When I go into the wings, I can’t remember what I’ve done. I don’t remember if my foot was pointed.”

But not all dancers achieve this every time, he added: “They stay in the rehearsal period. You can see that they’re thinking if their leg is in the right place.”

Scientists say motor learning like Mr. Corella’s can actually be observed in the brain. To know precisely where our bodies are in space at any given moment — an ability called propioception — our brain receives signals about the length of each muscle and the angle of each joint and “does a kind of mental trigonometry,” said Prof. Patrick Haggard of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College, London. Professor Haggard, who has measured the brain activity of ballet dancers using brain scanners, observes that dancers “have better propioception than the rest of us.”

“Those brain signals seem to be of a particularly high quality in dancers,” he said.

For many dancers, music can be a helpful prompt for muscle memory, enabling them to recall dances they did years ago. “It all comes at once,” said Mr. Corella, describing his response to familiar music.

But music can trip up dancers too, as the ballerina Julie Kent discovered while rehearsing the new “Sleeping Beauty” with Ms. Kirkland. Ms. Kent had danced the version by Kenneth MacMillan many times, and as Ms. Kirkland demonstrated a different position of the arms, Ms. Kent tried to resist her body’s natural impulses. “Your conscious thought has to override the stored memory and say, ‘No, it’s not that, it’s this,’ ” she said.

A self-described slow learner, Ms. Kent, 38, recalled that early in her career she didn’t perform a new work because she couldn’t remember the steps. Occasionally, she still forgets them. In rehearsals with Mr. Gomes, 27, a quick study and her partner this week in “The Dream,” she acknowledged that “I drive him crazy, because sometimes I’ll just blank. But I tell him, ‘Wait until you get to my age and you have all these ballets in your head.’ ”

Frederic Franklin, 93, can attest to that. Mr. Franklin is among the last of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo stars of the 1930s and has one of the most prodigious memories in dance. After watching a rehearsal at American Ballet Theater studios last month, he jabbed his temple. “It’s all in here,” he said. Even now, he added, “when I’m watching them, I can feel my muscles doing it.”

Source: The New York Times