Poll: Flexibility and Dance

[Kashmir]

I've taught a number of ballet dancers and have found they tend to have trouble relaxing into the insouciance that makes belly dance look effortless and approachable. I've never had a chance to ask someone who has been there and back again if she noticed any particular challenges going from BD to ballet.

We were watching a workshop with Denise Enan the other day. The interesting thing is she was ballet trained from a toddler - then she continued studying ballet as a member of the Firqa Kawmiyya - and many of the students had a little ballet - but not that much. But Denise projected the relaxed beledi feel while the students looked stiff (or had "good" posture at a pinch). Ballet in itself isn't the problem. It is what you do with it.

 

[Darshiva]

I'm hypermobile in the elbows and the hips. Let me tell you hypermobility in the hips is NOT the happy fun time for women that men seem to think it is!

 

[Zumarrad]

I've never had a chance to ask someone who has been there and back again if she noticed any particular challenges going from BD to ballet.

Well, I did ballet in the once-a-week sense for about seven years as a child, so I had a solid grounding in some basic stuff but never went on pointe or did anything you could consider "advanced". I wasn't particularly good at it. Then I did no ballet till I was in my 40s, a bit of contemporary mishmash dance in my early 20s and have had 15 years of bellydance starting in my 30s.

I notice a lot of things that are different about the way ballet is focused. It is very much about the appearance of weightlessless and about getting high off the ground, if you're jumping, which you are, or throwing or unfolding your legs, which you also are. As bellydancers no matter how orientale vs beledi we are being, we're still very grounded. I think ballet dancers' feet touch the ground and push off the ground, but ours are IN the ground. We're up to our ankles in dirt. Ballet dancers use the floor to launch their torsos (pelvises specifically!) high into the air; bellydancers use the floor to intensify the movements inside their standing torsoes. Ballet dancers extend the energy of their movements a long way out into the air around them; bellydancers keep it close. Ballet dancers are concerned with creating beautiful lines and shapes using their limbs rather than their torsoes; line is not so important for us but borrowing from ballet and other western theatre dance can help us learn how to make our idiosyncratic shapes more beautiful.

Apart from the obvious, like not being able to lift my legs extremely high to the back, not having perfectly straight legs, not being able to do a grand jete with my legs in a split (or, you know, at all), not having 90 degree turnout etc, the thing I notice the MOST that is difficult as a bellydancer going into ballet is covering the floor. Quite often my teacher will make a big deal of telling us to try and cover as MUCH floor as we possibly can. Huuuuge steps and leaps and bounds. This just does my head in (and I have really long legs and take quite large steps naturally). Our dance form, especially in its Egyptian mode, really celebrates what is tiny and contained and I just love taking small steps and feeling the intensity of a movement internally, rather than flinging it outwards. I am completely awful at darting across the room. I could do my glissade jete pas de bourree assemble (or whatever) practically on the SPOT and would much rather do it that way than try and cover the entire studio floor!

My arms are also a bit more inclined to be bellydancerish. Elbow a bit softer, and a habit of crossing my wrists instead of stopping properly in first and as I raise both arms into fifth, especially if it's out of a bend forward. There is some seriously good arm inspiration in my class though so I really try to model the arms, as the beautiful carriage and movement through space is never not going to be useful, especially to a very long-armed tall person like myself.

 

[Aniseteph]

I've got the ballet travelling thing the other way and default to covering way too much ground in belly dance. :wall:. It must have got hardwired at some point even though my ballet as a child was much the same as Zumarrad described. Some of that training sticks.

 

[Amulya]

Thank you Zumarrad for that comparison it really makes sense!

Speaking of using space, in the past I used to get people ask me why I stayed so much in one spot when dancing. That can look very awkward when there is a lot of space! The reason for me was that I had two square meter to practise on at home so I got used to not covering much space. It took me quite some time to undo that problem!

 

[Kashmir]

Speaking of using space, in the past I used to get people ask me why I stayed so much in one spot when dancing. That can look very awkward when there is a lot of space! The reason for me was that I had two square meter to practise on at home so I got used to not covering much space. It took me quite some time to undo that problem!

Tell them you are inspired by the pre-nightclub and stage version of the dance.

 

[Sophia Maria]

I notice a lot of things that are different about the way ballet is focused. It is very much about the appearance of weightlessless and about getting high off the ground, if you're jumping, which you are, or throwing or unfolding your legs, which you also are. As bellydancers no matter how orientale vs beledi we are being, we're still very grounded. I think ballet dancers' feet touch the ground and push off the ground, but ours are IN the ground. We're up to our ankles in dirt. Ballet dancers use the floor to launch their torsos (pelvises specifically!) high into the air; bellydancers use the floor to intensify the movements inside their standing torsoes.

This is true, and interesting because I haven't had any ballet training, apart from basic positions and basic movements and turns. In fact, before bellydance I did 4 years of modern dance, which was very grounded, feet flat on the floor, grounded. And yet I still have this ballerina posture--I don't know why on earth I have it.

I answered that my flexibility helped, only because I had gained that flexibility with dance training before, so the flexibility wasn't without control. Also the back and shoulder flexibility helped I think, with veil work and for chest articulations.

 

[SidraK]

Ballet in itself isn't the problem. It is what you do with it.

One of my ongoing ballet programming struggles is in the arms. My default is a very structured "stiff" arm, which is great for poses, not so great while dancing. So when I'm learning group choreography I tend to focus a lot on where my arms need to be and how I need to hold them, otherwise I'll go all balletish while everyone else actually looks like a belly dancer.:redface:

Just to make things even more difficult, I'm also double-jointed in the hands and wrists so if I over-think the hands, I end up freakishly hyperextending my fingers.

 

[Zumarrad]

One of my ongoing ballet programming struggles is in the arms. My default is a very structured "stiff" arm, which is great for poses, not so great while dancing. So when I'm learning group choreography I tend to focus a lot on where my arms need to be and how I need to hold them, otherwise I'll go all balletish while everyone else actually looks like a belly dancer.:redface:

Just to make things even more difficult, I'm also double-jointed in the hands and wrists so if I over-think the hands, I end up freakishly hyperextending my fingers.

I really wonder whether the training for arms differs significantly from style to style, or whether the longer a person trains and works in performance the more interesting their arms become, in ballet. I know we learned the positions as kids but it seems that getting to the positions and passing through the positions is the real nub of what makes them nice. My teacher is a man and his arms are beautiful - they never look stiff and really flow between positions in a way that looks natural yet elegant and impressive - and so I am always trying to copy. But lately in class there has been a young ex-ballerina (and I use the term in the "principal dancer" sense, not "chick who did ballet", I am way old school about that term), and OH, HER arms are just to die for. They are so, so beautiful, so fluid, so inspiring ... so NOT stiff! See also her upper body movement. It's just so swoonsome.

It's funny, I love doing things like glissees and petits battements at the barre because my feet enjoy pointing, and all the plies and jumping are fun and I think of them really as just strength and cardio work because I am not good at them at all, but everything from the ribcage up I am watching with my eagle eye and trying to learn how to use it to make my arms look nicer in bellydance.

 

[Kashmir]

One of my ongoing ballet programming struggles is in the arms. My default is a very structured "stiff" arm, which is great for poses, not so great while dancing.

When I switched from jazz I had to unlearn the hard finger splayed jazz hands. I consciously did visualizations and exercises for weeks. Thought I had all the jazz washed out of me. 20 years later I'm taking a movement class for adults and lots of the ways of moving have just popped right back (could be due to the music I'm using - much the same as we used in class in the 1980s plus blues - or maybe it is the beginning of alzheimers )

 

[Amulya]

It's true that it's hard to get rid of things we learned before. I notice that if I don't watch out I automatically go back into the style I started out with: Classic Egyptian, nothing wrong with that style of course! But when you're doing other styles it seems that you automatically revert back to the original style if you don't pay attention or go automatic pilot. I personally don't like the arm poses of classic Egyptian and if I don't watch out my arms just go back into that pose (I prefer tribal arms, I find they look more elegant) At the other hand classic Egyptian maybe suits my body better due to the flexibility? I just really like modern Egytian style, Tribaret and Tribal Fusion

Any tips to not end up with 'inside out arms', when holding arms above head in this pose, my elbows go inside out . I don't feel when mine hyperextend and it looks hideous. (If you want to have a laugh, have a look at my arm in this picture, I really like the picture but I always wonder why my arm is like that haha. These are the times when it's not good to be flexible)

 

[khanjar]

I was moderately flexible through doing yoga on and off for years prior to first starting to learn where now, this past tuesday one of the ladies in the class after we had a class on the correct use of arms and the the painful exercises to create weightless arms where we had a discussion on the theory that female dancers major in hip work and generally suck at upper body stuff and male dancers are the reverse of that where I seem to defy that theory, one of the ladies actually said my range of movement is impressive for a male as I can match the ladies in hip work, but I plain suck at upper body work, just like them. Where they currently beat me, is speed of movement, but then I know I am unfit and really do need to sort that issue out as I don't think I have ever been this unfit and that is saying something.

But I continue to practice Yoga off and on and so may be looking for a class soon to provide the motivation to get doing it properly again as motivation to do anything has taken a bit of a hit and along with that, my self confidence these past eighteen months or so.

But when I first started I found what I was being taught in private lessons I could do easily and so can only think the yoga perhaps helped and what I later found out was called a neutral skeletal structure in that I am much the same now as I was in my early twenties.

 

[Zumarrad]

Men who don't do physical labour often are no better at conventional "manly" activities than anybody else. If you sit at a desk all day you don't gain upper body strength, and lots of men today do that.

I also believe quite firmly that knowing how to do something is half the battle. When I was digging liquefaction with some coworkers I was much better at the digging part than some of the men, not because I am stronger than them or have a bigger upper body or whatever (quite the contrary), but because I know how people use spades, I guess.

 

[Sophia Maria]

It's true that it's hard to get rid of things we learned before. I notice that if I don't watch out I automatically go back into the style I started out with: Classic Egyptian, nothing wrong with that style of course! But when you're doing other styles it seems that you automatically revert back to the original style if you don't pay attention or go automatic pilot. I personally don't like the arm poses of classic Egyptian and if I don't watch out my arms just go back into that pose (I prefer tribal arms, I find they look more elegant) At the other hand classic Egyptian maybe suits my body better due to the flexibility? I just really like modern Egytian style, Tribaret and Tribal Fusion

Any tips to not end up with 'inside out arms', when holding arms above head in this pose, my elbows go inside out . I don't feel when mine hyperextend and it looks hideous. (If you want to have a laugh, have a look at my arm in this picture, I really like the picture but I always wonder why my arm is like that haha. These are the times when it's not good to be flexible)

I actually think your picture looks very nice, not weird. However, on second glance I can tell you're unusually flexible in the elbow there. Also, your first picture is of a dancer that I met a few months ago, at a hafla! Small world.

I also notice that it's really hard to revert to the first thing we learned. Which is why I don't understand why I look like a ballerina!! I've never taken ballet!

 

[Zumarrad]

My teacher had hyperflexible limbs. You just have to become aware of how it feels when they are in the correct position and teach your body to do it. One useful tip is obviously never "straightening" the arms, because then you get inside out elbows. You have to get used to feeling as if your arms are curved and held and not straight and long.

 

[Kashmir]

Any tips to not end up with 'inside out arms', when holding arms above head in this pose, my elbows go inside out . I don't feel when mine hyperextend and it looks hideous.

You could try length of tape on the inside of your arms so that when they hyperextend you get a pull on the skin. Not sure how long it would take to re-program your normal "straight" position though.

 

[Darshiva]

That's a really clever idea, Zum, I'll have to try it out once the weather cools enough that I won't accidentally sweat it off!

 

[Amulya]

I got to keep practising in the mirror because I don't feel if I hyper extend or not. Or maybe just leave that arm position.