Blog – Page 108

Flexaware by Steven Shafarman

Editor

-

October 10, 2007

FlexAware is a new type of exercise, inspired by the way young children learn and move. Young children are much more flexible than adults. They are also, for their size and weight, stronger than adults.

I created FlexAware after more than 20 years as a Feldenkrais Method practitioner. Though I was very successful, I was also frustrated. Many of my friends and students told me that exercising was painful. To help them exercise effectively, I studied anatomy, physiology, neuroscience, and child development.

Young children naturally tend to move efficiently. They align with gravity, rather than fighting against it. Their weight is supported by their bones — not muscles, tendons, ligaments, or other tissues. Muscles throughout their bodies have relatively even tone. Breathing is free, easy, and integrated with other movements.

Over time, children generally lose that innate skill. Adults teach them to sit still. Face forward. Stand up straight. Stop fidgeting. Stop squirming. Stop moving around. Through such injunctions, children learn to ignore discomfort. Spontaneous skipping and dancing yield to walking at a fixed pace. We adults sit for hours, moving minimally, breathing shallowly. Each of us has habits of straining, stiffening, and holding the breath. Such habits can cause chronic pain and other problems. Efficient movement is characterized by a sense of ease and comfort. As any muscle contracts, opposite muscles lengthen. That coordination is essential for mobility of the bones and joints. All skeletal muscles work that way. Every movement works that way. Breathing also works that way, involving many muscles throughout the trunk. The nervous system continuously coordinates all of the muscles in the body.

FlexAware exercises apply these facts; other exercises ignore them. Consider push-ups. The trunk is rigid, with muscles at the hip joints, pelvis, and along the spine contracting strongly. That rigidity makes it impossible to breathe freely. Those tight muscles squeeze nerves, blood vessels, cartilage, spinal discs, and other tissues, impairing circulation and nerve activity. Push-ups are inefficient by design, and condition people to strain and stiffen.

Sit-ups, crunches, and similar exercises are supposed to strengthen the abdominal muscles, the “abs” or “core.” By the logic of efficient movement, the abs coordinate with muscles in the back and hip joints. The abs attach to the ribs, which means they are vital for breathing. Yet people commonly do sit-ups while holding their breath. To really be strong, moreover, the abs, like other muscles, have to be able to relax and lengthen completely.

The next time you exercise, try this FlexAware alternative to sit-ups: Breathe out as you lift your arms, head, and shoulders. Breathe in as you return to the floor. Rest completely for a moment. Begin to exhale. Then lift as you continue to breathe out. Seek to make the movements smooth and easy. Notice how your contact with the floor changes as you lift your head, and as you lower it.

In FlexAware classes, everyone moves at his or her own pace. We use breathing to direct and coordinate each movement. We sense and think about gravity and the skeleton, and never focus on specific muscles, bones, joints, postures, or goals. We seek to make each movement easier, more comfortable, with less effort. Yet FlexAware can be quite vigorous and demanding, even aerobic.

Dancers and other athletes have special incentive to learn the ease, comfort, and efficiency that is taught in FlexAware classes. Moving efficiently can help us avoid or recover from injuries. It can prevent or relieve back pain, arthritis, headaches, repetitive strain injuries, and other problem conditions. The natural way of moving is also more graceful, more attractive, and more fun.

Steven Shafarman teaches FlexAware and educates new FlexAware teachers in Washington, DC. He is the author of Awareness Heals: The Feldenkrais Method for Dynamic Health. He can be contacted at 202-557-8384 or steve@FlexAware.com.

FlexAware is a trademark of FlexAware Learning Corporation.

originally published as: FlexAware™: A Revolution in Exercise, Fitness, and Healing
by Steven Shafarman in Bourgeon Vol. 3 #2

On Teaching by Helen Rea

Rob Bettmann

-

October 10, 2007

0

I have been a dancer all of my life – and have been a dance teacher for the past 30 of my 52 years. Over these years, my own body has changed and my needs and desires when I attend a dance class have changed. I have also found that my perspective as a teacher has changed, largely because of the range of experience I have had as a dance student. This has led me to explore different ideas in teaching. These explorations often generate more questions than answers – and propel me into new territory that keeps my life as a teacher very exciting. I have recently focused on encouraging students to pay attention to the sensation of the action that is a consequence of their intended movement.

The nervous system in our bodies has sensory and motor nerves. The sensory nerves bring information from our bodies to our brains – they let us know what is happening as it is happening. (I am not referring to the sensation of aches and pains that may come long after dancing. I am talking about the information that you have available DURING the movement process.) The motor nerves send signals to our bodies to take action – they tell a body part to move here or there. So often in my early dance training, the largest focus of my thinking was on these motor nerves. I would tell my body to do this and that – and for the most part, it would do what I asked. Luckily, I was young and I could do this with little negative consequences.

Over the years, however, my body started to complain. The sensory nerves started to pipe up and give me information about the consequences of my motor-focused approach. Initially, I would listen to by body long after the completion of the movement. It might be the following day that I would notice an ache or discomfort. Perhaps a few hours after cooling down I would sense that something was less than ideal. I came to see that I needed to reevaluate some of the ideas that I held to be true about how I danced. I needed to learn to pay more attention to this sensory information at the time I was moving so I could learn what needed to change and make new choices accordingly.

Now when I dance I try to leave both channels of communication open. I ask my body to perform a task, (for example: lift the right leg to the back) and I look to sense what my body does with that idea. How does the lifting of the leg affect the balance of my whole body? How does my torso want to shift to counterbalance the leg action? At what point has my leg gone high enough that I can stop lifting? How does the lift this time feel different from the previous time? Although it is taking lots of time to write about this process, the time it takes to gather the information – to sense and respond – is very quick! It’s a choice that can be made and an option that is always open.

As a teacher, I wondered how I could teach students the skills to do this for themselves. Teaching movement phrases is relatively simple; teaching students how to tune into their bodies, to sense and guide themselves while learning movement phrases – is a different thing. I needed students to focus on pleasing themselves – and not trying to please me. The focus of the class had to be student-centered, not teacher-driven. Primary importance had to be given to students following their own signals – even if it meant that they were not doing the same thing as the rest of the class.

One way I found to move in this direction was to teach phrases on the floor. When there is more contact between the body and the floor, there is more sensation. The sensory nerves are stimulated and provide lots of information about what the body is doing. The floor starts providing the feedback and teaching the student – even without the teacher’s watchful eye.

In creating classes that might be used to develop professional dancers, it seems two forces are at work. One the one hand, a student needs to develop coordination, master technique, and increase strength to offer prospective employers. On the other hand, to maintain a career as a dancer, it is important to learn great sensitivity to maintain physical health and achieve personal satisfaction in this extremely taxing profession.

Helen Rea was first influenced by her mother, who performed with Hanya Holm and Martha Graham. Ms. Rea performed for 8 years with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and co-directed Duets, etc., a modern dance repertory company. She was greatly influenced by the Bartenieff Fundamentals, her training as a certified teacher of The Alexander Technique, and her 20+ years of study in Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. She currently teaches dance classes at CityDance Center at Strathmore Music Center. She offers her own “Movement Improvement: Stretch and Integrate” classes and maintains a private practice in her studio in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland.

The DC Cowboys by Kevin Platte

Editor

-

October 10, 2007

1

The DC Cowboys, a 20-member internationally acclaimed all-male gay dance company, has been setting trends in country-western dance entertainment since 1994. Our high-energy choreography thrills crowds around the Washington DC metropolitan area, across the US, and in Canada. As a grant recipient from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, we have been honored for our “valued contribution to the Washington, DC arts community”. Our tag line of celebrating diversity through dance is so apropos.

We truly are a unique dance company in that we are gay men, dance in cowboy boots and volunteer our time while working full time day jobs. The dancers’ experience levels range from professional to some formal training to no training at all. The dancers, aged 24–44, rehearse once a week for two hours in the fellowship hall of a local church. We maintain a repertoire of about eight songs from the pop, country and Broadway genres.

This year we learned four new dance routines from three different choreographers. Our senior choreographer, Ernie Ritchey, created a jazzy, high-energy number to KT Tunstall’s “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” and also designed a 1940s-era military number to the swingin’ “Candyman” by Christina Aguilera. Craig Cipollini choreographed to Keith Urban’s “Days Go By,” which is an upbeat country song. Our newest choreographer, Carlos Barillo, a high school choral director, brought us a toe-tapping, highly physical routine to Sugarland’s “Down in Mississippi … And Up to No Good.” It typically requires three to four rehearsals to learn the new choreography followed by several weeks of cleaning before we debut a number in front of an audience. As new numbers are added, older song are retired, usually after two years.

Our audiences are from the gay community, specifically men. While we are not strippers, we recognize and capitalize on our sex appeal when marketing ourselves. In addition to our dancing, we’ve begun to brand ourselves as a product through an interactive website, extensive photo and video galleries and our merchandise (t-shirts, sexy pinup calendars and DVDs). We actively seek corporate sponsorships and patrons to keep the organization financially stable. We even brand our fans with temporary DC Cowboys logo. There is nothing like a fan walking with our logo prominently displayed on their body!
While marketing and sex appeal is important in creating a name, we pride ourselves in giving back to the community. Our organization’s mission is to provide high-quality, professional-level dance entertainment at no cost for benefits that raise money to provide services to people living with HIV/AIDS as well as for AIDS prevention programs.

Our season begins in January and goes through October or November, depending on our performance schedule. While many people think we line dance or two-step, we do neither in our performances. Our style is based in jazz and popularly described as “Cowboy Broadway.” We hold annual auditions and select the most qualified recruits and put them through a rigorous training camp before they join the veterans at the beginning of the calendar year.

Here are some highlights from the 2007 season. After being selected as one of the national headliners at the Gay Games VII at Chicago’s historic Wrigley Field in 2006, we were wondering how we could possibly top that this year. We didn’t have to wait long. In February, we performed on the RSVP Caribbean Fantasy Cruise for gay men as the opening acts for such recording artists as Grammy-winner Thelma Houston, Billie Myers and Kristine W on different nights. In April, we shared the stage at American University’s Goldberg Theater with DC-based Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh & Company. Besides our annual events in the DC area like the Northern Virginia AIDS Ministries’ annual fundraiser, the Capitol Pride Festival, the Atlantic Stampede gay Rodeo and other local benefits, we traveled to pride festivals, benefits or gay rodeos in Philadelphia, PA; Jacksonville, FL; Catskills of New York, and Las Vegas.

What’s next?

We’re already working on a few new marketing and fundraising projects for late 2007 and early 2008. These include a special “behind the scenes” DVD entitled, DC Cowboys Dance Company Exposed – On stage and at play, showcasing live performances, photo shoot footage with some nudity (of course) and fun interviews with the dancers. In addition, we plan to release a 2009 pin-up calendar and “making of” DVD next summer featuring photos taken in the Caribbean during the RSVP cruise. Photographed on a nude beach in St. Maarten, this fourth edition of the calendar is sure to be even more risqué than ever before. We may call it the Cowboys of the Caribbean Calendar.

In any case, we hope to return to another gay cruise in addition to our regular travel across the U.S. and Canada. It’s never a dull moment, and as I always remind my dancers, “you can’t get this anywhere else”!

Kevin Platte is the Artistic Director of The D.C. Cowboys.

Local Work (or not so local) by Jessica Hirst

Editor

-

October 10, 2007

5

Local Work (or not so local) by Jessica Hirst

After choreographing, teaching, dancing and performing in the DC area for six years I came to live in Managua, Nicaragua at the invitation of my partner, Otto Castillo.

Talk about a different working environment. My first several months we kept running out of water. We had to choose between taking a shower or washing the dishes. Now we have an alternating schedule of blackouts, one week no juice from 2pm to 7pm, next week dark from 5pm to 11pm. Most dance and aerobics classes take place on concrete or uneven, unfinished, untouched-since-the-revolution-when-the government-cared-about-culture wood floors. Then there are the mosquitos, the upset stomachs, the piropos (catcalls), the horrendous roads, the corrupt traffic police (they took my Maryland license because I wouldn’t pay up), the corrupt ex-revolutionaries, and, of course, the intense heat, uninterrupted by air-conditioning. My friends and family in the states can’t understand why I want to be here. Let me explain.

Nicaragua has become my space to try anything. I am free of whatever pressure I felt in Washington to succeed, to fit in, to not fit in, to be liked by the right powerful people, to show up on time. I have been discovering that I am less a choreographer-dancer and more a multidisciplinary artist who likes to move her body. I am still performing, more with images and actions than choreographed movement. My fascination with site-specific choreography has morphed into Nicaragua-specific art.

Garbage?

There is no such thing as garbage here. Anything with metal in it – old broken car parts, household appliances, teeth – can be resold. I started making earrings out of bottle caps, corks, keys, and wooden clothespins. While recycled fashion is chic in the US, here it is shocking to see a chela (white girl) with garbage hanging from her ears. Lately more people have been asking where they can get their own, which I take as a good sign.

Violation

The amount of child sexual abuse here is staggering, as is the Sandinistas’ crass decision to curry favor with the Church by outlawing all abortions, even when the pregnancy is the result of rape or the mother’s life is in danger. I kept imagining pregnant little girl dresses hanging on a clothesline. I made a performative installation that incorporates the dresses and macho futbol (soccer) slang for sex. The National Network of Women Against Violence invited me to show it in front of the Supreme Court and at National Women’s Day. The companion piece, which I have performed in Costa Rica and Tijuana, is an homage to Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, in which she invited the audience to cut her dress off of her. In my piece I wear a little girl-style dress and recite a litany of cases, statistics, and commentary on child sexual abuse while people cut my dress. The air gets very charged, and the piece takes on a ritual quality. For some people, including abuse survivors, it is therapeutic, for others it is disturbing to be confronted with this part of their reality.

Ritual Sex

One of my least favorite cultural institutions here is the Auto Hotel. Auto Hotels are designed expressly for covert sexual encounters, and they’re everywhere. When you drive into an auto-hotel an attendant waves you toward a very tight enclosed parking space. He closes a huge curtain behind your car. Inside you find a bed, condoms, a TV that only shows bad porn, a wooden suggestion box, a bathroom, and towels embroidered with the hotel’s name. In one place we saw playground/workout/torture equipment for more exotic sex. We stole the helpfully framed cartoon instructions for ‘the many positions you can enjoy’ on this jungle gym, in addition to the towels and the suggestion box. One last bit of brilliance on the anonymity front: you interact with the hotel staff through a wooden box in the wall, so they never see you. We ordered rum and soda and they delivered it through the box.
I made a performance piece in which I engage the audience as a gringa archaeologist studying the sexual behavior of Nicaragua in the 21st century. The audience seemed to find it hilarious, especially since it featured a bumbling, self-deprecating North American.

There was one genuine suggestion in the box when we took it from the Auto Hotel, and I asked the audience to submit their own guesses as to what the suggestion was. The correct answer was not titillating on the surface, but look beneath and you will find implications of a dark and dangerous world: ‘Please remove the outdoor lighting on the entry from the street’.

I doubt I will return to pure choreography, and that´s OK. I was always supremely frustrated alone in a studio trying to make movement.

Jessica Hirst is a multidisciplinary artist who lives in Managua, Nicaragua, and Washington, DC. In Managua she lives with her partner, artist and psychologist Otto Castillo, and her dog, Benedicto the 17th.

Musings on Tundra by Mare Hieronimus

Editor

-

October 10, 2007

3

The story of my newest project, Tundra, is part of an ongoing story about how I am trying to make sense out of the intersection of literature/narrative and dance. In the creation of Tundra, I started with a series of questions. What is it to be a woman in the world, alone? What is it to choose solitude? Does solitude turn into an exile from self, shadow self, or other? What does it mean to face ones shadow.

I turned to writing – as I often do – as a way to sort through these questions. The writing for Tundra grew, and started to take on the form of a story written in an old- English inspired prose. Simultaneously, I was working in the studio with movement.

I have always found writing and dance very difficult to integrate. Dance can be nonlinear, overlapping, and multi-dimensional. Dance can create a whole picture and experience without adhering to a linear sense of time. Beginnings and endings can mysteriously happen in reverse, and make perfect sense. Traditional written language is linear in nature.

I found myself struggling with merging the world that I had on paper, a half finished story about a sort of visitation of the shadow, with the world that was happening in the studio, in our bodies. I was very apprehensive about laying a narrative on top of the dance. Working across disciplines calls for a delicate balance, the right arrangement where one medium enhances the other, without overshadowing it. At this point in my process, the parts remained very separate, and I continued to think of the writing as a hazy backdrop that the audience might never see.

I made an initial draft of the dance Tundra in January 2007. I was utterly confused by it. Frustrated by my own inability to integrate and merge my ideas in a cohesive way, I wanted it out of my life. And luckily – life gave me a diversion; I was whisked away by Maida Withers to tour Russia.

Strangely enough, Maida took me to a personal tundra while we toured Moscow, and the physical tundra of Siberia. While in Russia I had a deepening of my own experience of solitude and land. I also found myself pushed to a limit, facing things that terrified me, and living in a sort of a barren and beautiful terrain (a terrain that I had psychically imagined as the world of my work at the time.) I couldn’t really escape. I suppose we never really can escape our thoughts. Through this journey, something shifted.

When I returned to the States I came back ready to finish my written story, and ready to take a different step with the performance, though I still wasn’t sure what that step would be. Shortly after returning to New York, in May of 2007, I was asked to perform informally at a Salon showing. I had no original sound score. So I decided to merge the written prose with the movement, and to allow the prose to be an integral part of the sound score for the dance. I created a score through the text and other found sound. For whatever reason, this was terrifying for me. I think I was scared to reveal too much, to move too close to narrative, and to lose the sense of mystery that I often try to cultivate in my work. Response to the performance was very positive though, and instead of losing its mysterious quality, people told me that it gained a whole new level of intrigue, that they were able to enter into the world in a more complete way.

Through the summer and now into the fall, I have been working to complete my dance/story. Using the story as the score, I am moving along creating it, part by part. I don’t know what it will be in the end, of course. But I am thrilled by this dive into the literary aspect of my work, and by the prospect of fusing these media together in a more cohesive way. It has also given me new fuel for other projects, new ideas about how I can incorporate story and narrative into my world of dance.

Maré Hieronimus is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary dance artist, performer and teacher. Often working as a solo performer, Maré creates abstract and psychic landscapes, using the body in motion as the primary impulse. Her choreographic and improvisational performance experiments have been presented in gallery and site specific settings, including in NYC at Dixon Place, The Flea Theatre, Monkeytown, The 92nd St. Y, Solar One Powered Dance Festival, and Les Petit Versailles Gardens. Tundra can be seen this fall at White Wave Rising Festival October 31st, November 2nd, November 3rd, November 4th

www.marehdance.com
www.whitewavedance.com

originally published in Bourgeon Volume 3 #2 as: Finding the Dance Story: Musings on My Process With Tundra
by Mare Hieronimus