Basic Principles

Overview

These seven basic principles are designed to help you build your dance from the "inside out."

• Body alignment gives us "hip freedom": We "re-align" our bodies so that our abdominal and thigh muscles do the work, and we can release tension in our back, shoulders, and neck. This is much more demanding than it seems, and I'll coach you on this again and again! When we do this right, and place our weight on one side or another, we find that we have incredible freedom in our hip joint. This is how we can do a great range of hip movements; hip drops, thrusts, forward thrusts, circles -- they all come from having our hip joint released and "available."
• Cranial-sacral connection gives us undulations: As we re-awaken and invoke our natural sense of spinal connection, whereby the vertebrae right beneath our cranium connect all the way to what happens at the base of our spine (sacral area), we find that we gently, naturally, and freely evoke a spinal undulation. This is one of the most powerful "inner movements" of our bodies; one that is too often damped out by the accumulated stress and tension of our daily lives. By finding and experiencing this cranial- sacral connection, we release a movement that is both hypnotically beautiful in itself, and also underlies a great number of other vocabulary elements.
• Arm gestures come naturally from torso rotations: The greatest martial arts masters, writing about Tai Chi Chu'an, wrote that "The hands and arms don't move." But if you've seen or studied Tai Chi, you see that they do indeed seem to move. The secret? As we move our torsos, our arms and hands follow in a completely natural, free, and unaffected manner. We can generate this either by a turn in our torso, or (for more complete movement), by rotating our pelvis. If we pay attention to our natural "body connectedness," we notice that our pelvic rotation generates the arm and hand movements. This so intrinsically a part of how our bodies work that we do not have to "effort" this move. In fact, our work is to learn how to "not-effort" this! This gives us a beautiful, relaxed, and gentle aspect to our dance. As we cultivate and expand this further, we gain the whole range of motions that we later call "snake arms."
• Pelvic awakening: A floorwork move, using slow pelvic rotations, to reconnect with how we can generate a full spinal twist starting with our pelvis. We start the turn with pelvis (rotation inward), ribs, shoulders, head, and then reverse: head, shoulders, ribs, pelvis.
• Figure-eights "hidden" in our sacro-iliac region: As we become more sensitized to our internal rhythms, we connect with a very small, very internal "movement pattern" at the base of our spine; a natural "breathing" of our spine in a figure-eight pattern. When we tap into this and expand it, we access a natural and intrinsic figure-eight that becomes expressed more overtly as a dance move.
• Releasing neck tension gives us a natural and beautiful litle "head bobble": Our necks are so often stiff that we have limited range of motion where our neck and shoulders connect. As we release the tension in this area, we uncover a natural and delightful little movement that tremendously joyous and fun in our dance repertoire.
• Breath Connection: We note that as our pelvic turns, or as we tap into a cranio-sacral undulation, we have a natural connection with our breath. Our breathing corresponds to the compression and expansion in our torso. Our goal here is to learn how our pelvic turn / torso movement expresses as contraction / expansion, and how contraction expresses as a "breathe out" and expansion expresses as a "breathe in."

Levels 2 and 3 -- Studies at Home:

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