Dance-ilates Intro

Welcome to dance a lot is I want to go over a few pointers before we start so that you can follow along. It's a meld of a dance, Yoga and Pilati. So I want to go over some dance things first. Uh, just for the audience at home. No, you need a chair and a mat. We're going to be sitting on the chair doing some interesting workout things later on. So we're going to start, it's in four parts really. We start standing and it has a little bit of a dance quality to it, but, uh, it is dance exercise. Don't worry about going left or right. I may cue you, but if you go right first, when I say left, it doesn't matter because we're going to go the other way and it doesn't matter. Okay, so dance terms first, the feet positions.

This is kind of a tribute to Ron Fletcher. We want to stand in sixth position to begin and balance the weight evenly from the forefoot to the heel, toes, ball of the feet, and he'll press down and drawing the energy up through the crown of the body. Just all our polities. Yes, so we've got that energy down, the energy up from side to side and front to back. All right, sixth position. So that's a parallel. Feet pressed together. We can also stand. Sometimes we're going to be standing with the feet hip width apart, still in parallel. All right, now from six position, if you close again, you want to open and close, good and open and close and open and stay there. And that's your first position.

All right, now I use a term called plea a quite often, which means a knee bend and in a plea, a, we'd bend the knees so that they track directly over the center of the toe. So if you're in sixth position, you want to make sure you're not going knocking the aid or bull legged, but really squeezing everything together. It feels like being on the reformer, doing footwork. Very similar. Okay, so there's our first position, second position. We're going to step out and we're about the width of one and a half of your feet in second position. Important here. Sometimes we stag around. We want to really hold from the hip rotators, the glutes, I call this area right here. The junction. Yeah, it's our little smiley shape where the leg meets the buttocks. So when I say squeeze your junction or activate from the junction, think about that. So when we do a play here, we really want to dry inner thighs and engage the junction to draw up.

Be careful not to lock into the legs, but really work up all the way through the center of the body. Again, it's like the reformer work. Okay, so come back to six position and here I just want to go over towards the end we start standing, we go to the chair, then we do the mat work, the very end we're going to stand up again and rebalance everything back together the way we started the workout. So we have at the end some balancing to put it all together. So we want to be able to roll through the feet. So we go through the ball of the foot, push off, there's your balance and back down and we'll be doing that on each side. The other thing is a dance term called passe.

So once we've rolled through the foot and pushed off, we want to be able to draw the toe to the inside of the knee. And if you squeezed there, you should be able to hold. Yes. And then also from first when we go into passe, we can bring our arms out to the side. We're going to do passe this way and we want to be careful as much as possible to keep the two hip bones level and not tip. Yes, it's a challenge. All right, so that's our feet positions and our past days. Now we want to go through the arm positions.

So in dance we have the arms low and then arms in first position it's like hug a tree and second position. So it's just like how good tree when we open and close, first position, second position, and then the arms also come overhead. This is called fifth position. So we're actually going to be doing roll-ups later in the mat work using our ballet fifth position. So when I cue fifth position, you know what I'm talking about. All right. So arms low, I'm [inaudible] forward second position and fifth position on. Okay. Alright. So now just as far as where we're working with music, which is really exciting and fun. And um, usually in providers we do 10 reps of everything, but for a dance 10 doesn't work so well.

So we're going to be working in twos, fours and eights for the most part. And one of the things that dancers are quite used to that may be unfamiliar to you is half time and double time. So quite often I'll give um, a cue. We're doing something very slow, like say please from second position and we're going to go slowly a couple of times and then we'll go back and we'll repeat it. But if we do double time, there'll be four reps instead of two. So quite often you'll get the move slow to catch on and then I'll go double time, speed it up. All right. So you just need to listen to the music. Okay.

And if you mess it up. So what another dance term? Isolations of the body. This comes from jazz. So when we go into the section isolating the body, we're going to start from the hips and pelvis area, tipping the pelvis forward and back and side to side. And when you do that, you want to really lift up and not involve the rest of the body. Try to isolate just the pelvic area. Same thing. We move on up into the ribs. Ribs go forward, back side to side.

Usually we stop in the center so that it's real, uh, accented with the music. Okay, so then we get into the shoulders. Same thing, forwards, up, back and down, back up, forward and down. And we smooth it out. Later on we're going to do head. Also the head can move in three directions down in, up, like we're saying, tipping side to side and looking over the shoulder, which feels a little bit like chest expansion from [inaudible]. All of these things are interrelated, so when we get to it, it'll be familiar. Now the hand action, I've put a lot of hand action into this.

I feel like everyone's typing and texting and their hands are getting very tense. Some people have carpal tunnel syndrome. So there's a lot of hand exercise. So we have some moves where we're really making a tight fist and I call them the hand flicks, flicking out. And when you flick out you really want to spread the energy out. I actually say we're throwing a spell when we do the hand flicks.

Okay. We're going to be rotating. So we start in a fist rotate and push. And when we push, we don't want to lock the elbows, mind just pop. We want to push and tighten the muscles without actually locking any joints so that you get action, not just in the wrist in hand, but all the way through the arm. It's kind of an isometric. So we have a whole hand and uh, fingers dance the fingers when we get to the fingers, turn your palms up, try making a fist, rolling in one finger at a time. Pinky fourth finger, third and into the thumb and then flick and then roll it open and spread the fingers wide. And then later on we reverse it.

This is harder. Thumbs in out, right and thumbs in. And then pinkies out. Okay, so little bit of coordination there. Whatever you do though, really try to work those hands. It'll feel good when you're done a lot of tension release. Okay, so the last thing I want to talk about is the yoga references in this position, which we call six position. It can also be called [inaudible], which is mountain pose. In Yoga, we want to feel grounded and centered from the balls of the feet right through the crown of the head. And I talk about the marionette string in our warm up so that we really feel when we go up and down that we're pressing down to go up and lengthening up to come down. There's that feeling of working on a, on a marionette string, up and down. So we want to feel very centered. The arms have a lot of gestures, prayer, position, overhead and prayer position pressing into the heart center. Now here we really want to press the palms together and press the thumbs into the heart center, lifting the chest to meet the hands, drop the shoulder blades down the back and engage the powerhouse from politeness. And we have this very centered feeling.

There's a lot of repeated movements of kind of washing the body and balancing the aura. So we have a player here where we bend down, wash the thighs, and smooth your aura, and then reach the arms up to prayer position and then bend the knees, open the arms, and again, draw the energy up and back into the hips. So whenever we're smoothing the body, think about centering and kind of taking all the creases out of your aura and smoothing everything out. So we're going to get a good workout and a balanced workout, and hopefully you'll feel centered in body, mind, and spirit when we're done.