I am a painter, a sculptor, an architect, a musician, a mathematician, an engineer, an anatomist, a geologist, a cartographer, a botanist, and a writer. My one regret is that I am not a dancer.
Leonardo da Vinci
He just didn’t have the feet
Dance safety often involves attention to myriad minute and difficult details. This is not one of those. In dance, like in geometric proofs, there is given information that we must accept as true in order to be successful. Please treat this dance safety advice as a given:
You need to avoid falling off of the stage
Dance Safety is a crucial area of study for all dancers. While it is helpful to study what techniques we want to include in our dancing, sometimes it is equally useful to determine the things we want to avoid. For instance, when landing from a jump, we want to use safe dancing technique by landing softly through our feet with our knees over our toes. We want to avoid landing on a body part that is unable to cushion our landing.
With that in mind, here is a video detailing one thing to avoid while dancing:
#1. Don’t land on your face
Young-and not so young-dancers often wonder what and who they can watch to learn from. Sports players can watch videos of games both excellent and poor, and learn lessons from both. Since dance is an art, however, the differences in videos are often artistic rather than technical. Differences in interpretation cannot be ranked, and every individual will have a different opinion of every dance and dancer. This means that there really is no overarching list of videos every dancer should watch. Except for the one I have compiled on this site.
Here is the first installment in the list of videos every aspiring dancer should watch:
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Peaceful Warrior
The Matrix
Airplane!
Equilibrium
Please comment and let myself and others know what you learned from each video.
These are dancebelts.
They suck.
While extremely dramatic on stage, Baryshnikov was also emotionally driven offstage, and several quotes show that he was not afraid to express his powerful feelings. For instance, he probably said this:
I really, really hate you.
-Mikhail Baryshnikov, to dance belt
Fuckin’ dancebelts man
It is a common misconception that warming up before stretching is essential.
The reasoning for this is often that stretching can produce a dramatic change in the body, and it is best for the body to be as prepared as possible to receive this change. Hogwash. Think about the most dramatic change the body can undergo: surgery. Before surgery, does the doctor guide us through calisthenics? Is cardio performed before an operation? Of course not. For surgery, the most drastic change a body can experience, anesthesia is administered.
Anesthesia is used because for surgery to be successful, it is imperative that we are unaware of what is happening. The surgeon may be cutting away skin and splitting apart bone, but in the end we are put back together in better health than when we started out.
If we want similar success when stretching, we must be similarly unaware of what is happening. Anesthesia, therefore, is the goal for any serious stretcher, and the best way to anesthetize a muscle is to make it extraordinarily cold.
It is a well known fact that Sir Edmund Hillary perfected his splits on the summit of Everest
If geographically possible, try stretching outside in the snow. Investigate the possibility of using dry ice when stretching. Above all, experiment. Leave comments with your success stories below.
Watching a dancer who clearly enjoys jumping always makes me think one thing, which I believe famous male dancer Nijinsky, who could apparently jump over pianos, also thought while jumping:
Wheeeeee!
-Vaslav Nijinsky
Wheeee!
Directors of hugely famous ballet companies often have inspiring and effective corrections for students and professionals alike. Sometimes, though, you just have to say it like it is:
Please stop sucking
-Kevin McKenzie
Just stop
There are many myths about stretching. The most damaging is that inflexible people can stretch to become flexible. This is untrue. Believing that inflexible people can stretch is to misunderstand the basic premise of stretching. Stretching is not meant to help inflexible people become flexible. It is for flexible people to show off.
Totally hired
Inflexible people, take heart. It is still possible to have a dance career by marrying a flexible person and living vicariously through flexible children. Flexible people, any dance career is up for grabs. To get the most out of dancing, be sure to stretch as much as possible in front of the inflexible people.