As we close out the year (good riddance, 2020!), I want to offer a final technique tip and an observation.
First the tip:
Keep your shoulders in front of your hips during pirouettes, penchees, promenades, jumps, and generally speaking, during pointe work.
What do I mean?
Grab a mirror and observe your alignment in profile when you stand up straight. Where are your shoulders in relation to your hips: behind your hips, centered over them, or in front of them? Most likely they are centered over them. If you have a tendency to slouch, your shoulders may be behind your hips.
When we rise onto demi-pointe or pointe, we often pull our shoulders back or allow them to droop; this includes turns and pushing off the floor for jumps.
Now, still in profile, lift your ribcage up out of your waist and gently move your torso forward. Note that your hips are still over your heels and your pelvis is in a neutral position, nothing is tucked or gripped. This is where you want to be when you prepare for a pirouette or take an arabesque into a penchee or even when you push up off the ground for a jump.
What do I not mean?
Don't roll your shoulders or hike them up to your ears. Also, try not to hyperextend your lower back and avoid splaying the ribs.
Please note the dancer's shoulder placement in the arabesque to the left.
(Ron Kroon / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Please note the placement of the shoulders in this grand jete to the right.
What will this do for you?
For one thing, it helps stabilize you, balancing your natural tendency to fall back as you go up. And for another it will help you engage your back muscles and keep you lifted and not sinking.
And now...an observation about the influence of the pandemic on our bodies (as if we didn't need to know about yet another negative effect!):
When incidental activity is diminished, our baseline of movement is affected.
What do I mean by "incidental activity?"
That's the walking from our cars to the grocery store, the running into the bank to deposit a check, the filling up of our gas tanks, the casual jostle walking among crowds at an event or in a school or a theater or on public transportation...all these things contribute to the baseline of our movement including balance.
Remember before the pandemic when you used to walk around with a purse or shoulder bag or backpack? You would have to balance that on your shoulder and move it with you when you moved, from side to side or up and down. That's movement. That's balance. That's activity. When you're not doing that as frequently, you have far fewer chances to practice.
In your homes, it's a quick walk to the restroom or to get some water but at the dance studio, maybe it was down the hall. That's extra movement, extra walking you did.
In our Zoom environments, we sit to talk to people because if we stand, we are at waist level with our cameras; if we move around, our microphones won't pick up our voices and our auto focus gets blurry. But these are all things we used to do when we talked to people in real life.
What is the result? And how does that affect dancing?
One thing we lose is muscle tone: all that sitting doesn't give our quads and calves and hamstrings opportunities to strengthen, nor does our core engage as frequently. When we don't walk as much, we lose our stamina and get out of breath more quickly. And when we don't have to adjust around people, we don't have chances to find our balance.
For our dancing, this means we must take extra steps in class. Even if you were taking the same number of classes as you were before, likely you are not working as hard or have the ability to do things like jumps or allegro. Our balance might not be as good because we aren't calling upon it as often.
What can we do?
In class, we can take the time to work on balance OFF the barre when we need to engage our cores and stabilize ourselves. We can build calf and ankle strength through extra exercises. We can also do small jumps in sneakers if we don't have the correct flooring.
Outside of class, we can walk a little bit more (an extra turn around the block with the dog), maybe carry something with us so we build some upper body strength and work on balance. Hiking or carefully navigating uneven surfaces can also help us balance.
