Exercise: A Healthier Approach

I've always loved movement. Exercising has never really felt like a chore for me. It's something I enjoy and something I look forward to, particularly when I get into a nice routine, but over the course of my twenty something years I've endured periods of time when my outlook and attitude toward exercise became warped and unhealthy.
For a big stretch of my life--adolescents into early adulthood--I exercised to be skinnier. Burning calories was my primary goal with toned abs coming in at a close second. (I have a feeling I'm not alone in this, ladies.)  I saw any workout that didn't burn hundreds of calories an hour as essentially pointless, particularly since I figured I was already getting all the strength and flexibility training I needed in dance class. I was wrong.
After wading through various body-image issues, eating disorders and compulsive overexercising, I now like to focus my workout energy on getting stronger not smaller. I don't want to take up less space--I want the muscles I have to be as healthy and capable as possible so I can, you know, live my life. Feeling more confident in a tank top isn't a bad side effect either. Primarily, though, I exercise because it makes me happier. It's an act of self-care (and also of family care because no one likes to live with the cranky monster I become when I go too long without moving enough).
I've been teaching a lot of barre fitness classes lately, which I love, along with Pilates and heavier weight lifting on my own. It's sometimes challenging to balance my teaching workouts with my personal ones and I'm now trying to negotiate the line between keeping up with a routine that makes me feel good and the possibility of over training. Part of the "self-care" attitude I've taken regarding exercise means paying attention to the signals my body's giving me. Sometimes this means I skip a workout and take a long bath or trade a planned gym visit for some gentle stretching at home. Other times self-care means fighting my desire to stay inside in my pajamas feeling sad with a short walk around my house. It's a balancing process that I'm still trying to figure out.

In conclusion, exercise. Exercise for the right reasons. Get stronger, feel better. Take care of yourself. The end.

Dance, Mama!

    In every book or movie about ballet, there's a scene in which the uptight-but-lovable ballerina reluctantly attends a modern (or jazz or African or hip-hop) dance class. She's uncomfortable at first, but ultimately lets loose in a montage of flowing hair and slow-motion pirouettes. Rolling around on the floor to the beat of a bongo helps her rediscover her passion for dance and gets her through her existential ballet crisis. Ballerina will then become a modern dancer or join a hip-hop crew or become a principal dancer with Cooper Nielson's new company.

Jody's chronic lip bite finds a home in jazz class.

   Those kinds of scenes always frustrate me because, as a ballet dancer, that first modern or hip-hop class is rarely liberating. It's confusing and frustrating to have to use your muscles in whole new ways, to sift through years of classical training to figure out what you can use to your advantage (alignment, strength) and what you need to throw away (turn out, everything you thought you ever knew about dance) to perform those strange new movements correctly. Rekindling my passion for dance has always been more about the context in which I'm dancing than the style or technique itself. When burn out rears its ugly head it's usually because I haven't been dancing enough in the right place with the right people.
One of the major drawbacks of doing something I love for a living (teaching dance) is that I often start to feel burned out. I've written before about the ways I combat boredom when it comes to teaching the same classes over and over again, but burn out is a slightly different monster. Burn out makes me wonder why anyone wants to take ballet. Burn out makes me doubt my abilities. Burn out makes me want to delete ever Finis Jhung class album from my phone and curl up under the covers.
I know that a big part of it has to do with overwhelming myself with private lessons and classes to the point where I never have time to do much actual dancing myself outside of the classroom. I know intellectually that dancing more (not teaching, just dancing) will make me feel better but I usually end up just wallowing and whining about my burn out until someone snaps me out of it. This morning, that someone was my toddler.
I woke up with plans to tackle the housecleaning I'd neglected during my busy week of teaching. After getting dressed, changing a couple of diapers and feeding that toddler breakfast, I turned on my favorite Tony Bennett album and sat down for a few fortifying sips of coffee before beginning the day's work. My son heard the music and ran over to me with the biggest grin on his face. He grabbed my hand and tried to pull me to my feet saying, "Dancing! Dance, Mama!"
It about melted my heart. I love that he associates my favorite music with dancing and that he associates dance with me. I loved being pulled onto the dance floor, even if the dance floor was my living room and my partner was my 20 month old son.  For the next few minutes we swayed and jumped and stamped to the music holding hands. I didn't think about technique or choreography or how many costumes I still had left to order this season. I just moved to some music with someone I loved.
It was good.

Steps I Can't Teach

I've been doing this dancing thing for a long time. 

A very long time.
Ballet never came naturally to me as a student--I had to work harder than many of my peers to gain the flexibility and strength required of me. For years, I worked against forces in my body I couldn't control, like the arches in my feet (or lack thereof) and the tightness in my back and hip flexors.  That extra work pushed me to really think about the way my muscles had to engage or move in each step and position. Little did I know that the frustrating experience of studying ballet in a non-ballerina's body was preparing me for a career in teaching. 

As a dancer, I have to be able to perform steps correctly. As a teacher, I have to understand the mechanics behind every position, shape and action in ballet. Furthermore, I need to be able to relay that information clearly to my students.

There's a whole separate language of movement, a vernacular specific to ballet, at work in every classroom. When teaching beginners, I'm acting as a translator. For the most part, I think I'm okay at this. Of course I'd like to improve. I'm obsessed with researching new teaching methods and reading about what other respected teachers are doing in their studios but teaching itself has come pretty naturally to me--with a few exceptions. There are a few basic, easy steps I absolutely fail at teaching. 

I really struggle with teaching balancé (a simple waltz step) and petit battements (a small beating movement of the foot). I love both of these steps. I find them fun and straightforward, but frustrating to try to explain. Maybe these movements feel so organic to me, so much a part of my body after so many years, that dissecting them piece-by-piece gets me all garbled and confused, like when you say a word so many times it loses its meaning.

 I demonstrate the step slowly. I have students mimic me as I do it. I look at each moment in the step and probably use some stupid metaphor like, "Swim through the jelly, dancers! Swim through the jelly!" to clarify. The metaphor does not clarify anything. Students look at me like I'm insane. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Am I alone on this? Do any of you teachers out there struggle with teaching certain steps or concepts? 

Busy, Busy January

Hi, Friends and Readers:

January has been a rewarding--and cold--month. I've been working on prioritizing and time management as I gear up for my busiest time of year. So far my efforts have paid off and I'm feeling ready to face the rest of winter!

I've started teaching BarreFIT at my studio and absolutely love it. I became a devotee of barre workouts in NYC since they combine two of my passions--ballet and Pilates! BarreFIT is my own program that seamlessly blends those dance and pilates elements with yoga and cardio. If you live locally, come check out the class on Thursday mornings at 6:30 am. A Monday morning and Friday evening class will begin later next month.

On the dance side of things, I've been busy choreographing dances, ordering ballet costumes and trying to make some tough decisions about the future direction of my business.

My humble studio is undergoing some ceiling renovations this week that I'm excited about. After those structural things done, we'll continue working on the cosmetic improvements we began last spring. I'm not the best interior decorator but it's always fun to give a new look to an old space.

As a performer, I've been busy with rehearsals for another play--this time a dinner theater production of Daddy's Girl with the Short Tract Town Theater (where I did Rogers & Hammerstein's Allegro last summer). It's been fun to play the mean girl.

Onto February!

Moments of Joy

       Sometimes, I let the moments of joy in my dance studio pass by.  I can get so focused on helping my students improve their technique that I forget to encourage them to enjoy their dance class experience. I'm still working on finding that balance between insisting upon discipline and respect and letting them be kids having fun with movement.

       My closest ballet friend and I met in ballet class when we were 10 and 11 years old, respectively. We were a pair of serious and dedicated ballerinas who only let our guards down (and acted like the kids we were) with one another. Our parents actually had to remind us to let loose and have fun every now and then. To that, my friend would usually say, "I don't do ballet because it's fun. I do it because it's hard." 

     For most of my life, that's how I've operated. I choose the activities that are challenging. I make goals and plan my life around accomplishing them. 

        Because I had that kind of mindset as a kid, it's difficult for me to remember as an adult that most of the kids I'm teaching take dance because it's fun. Most of them do not have their sights set on joining a ballet company. Many might not even plan to dance beyond May or next year or high school. While I still want to provide the training foundation that a student who does want to dance professionally should have, I am trying to be more focused on my students' joy and less focused on the perfection of their technique. 

      This past week, I had one of those great dance teacher/studio owner days. I entered the studio stressed out about a last-minute scheduling change we had to make due to some building repairs in my studio. I was worried parents would be confused or upset by some cancellations and schedule adjustments. I was soon reminded how blessed I am to have a studio full of understanding and supportive parents and kids. Everyone was gracious about the changes and excited about the building repair. I really have the best families at my school. 

     Inside the studio, all of my students were happy and cheerful. I noticed the tremendous progress they were making technically and the joy this progress seemed to give them. It was just a fun night. 

       As we work toward our end-of-year show and I make plans for the future of my school, I'm trying to remember those moments of joy; the moments that make me happy I'm a dance teacher. 

Swan Lake Begins

In my last couple of post, I mentioned that I'm staging a mini-production of Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake with my students this spring.

Even abridged, that's a huge undertaking. We haven't even started rehearsing yet, but I'm already freaking out a little bit. What was I thinking?

I chose this ballet for a number of reasons. First, it's fairly easy to abridge. I'd love to do a full-length production of a classical work in the future, but for now, my resources are too limited to be able to do that well. I think we'll still be able to tell a cohesive story with our shorter length version with a little creativity. I also wanted the first ballet HMAC tackled to be something familiar to most audiences.

Casting such a major, iconic ballet with a small number of students is proving a challenge. Swan Lake traditionally has a very large corps de ballet. I'm working with a total cast of about twenty dancers (about half of whom are under the age of ten).  I have some blocking ideas for how to make the stage seem fuller and plan to use my little ones and jazz students as supers (extras) when needed. While I don't have many dancers advanced enough to tackle the Petipa and Ivanov's iconic choreography, I'm trying to model mine after the original as much as possible. I'm excited for the challenge this will give my more advanced students, particularly those playing the principal roles. I hope Swan Lake will push them to hone their acting and performance skills along with their technical prowess.

Thanks to the freezing cold weather in our neck of the woods, I have an extra two days out of the studio to edit music and work on choreography. In spite of my stress and nerves, I'm ecstatic to bring this gorgeous music to life on stage for local audiences!

Fat Talk

I have a no fat talk policy.

Sometimes I break that rule in my own life. For all my talk about healthy body image, there are still days when I don't feel great about what I see in the mirror. I still struggle with worrying about numbers--the digits on the scale or the measurement of my waist. I'm aware that those feelings may be around in some capacity for the rest of my life and I try to acknowledge those negative thoughts and replace them with more positive ones.

In my studio, it's much easier to enforce the policy. I spoke on a podcast recently about how I try to encourage my students to think and talk positively about their bodies. As a teacher and role model (Scary!) for young girls, it's important to be aware of how even the tiniest comments can cause dancers to be self-conscious or overly self-critical.

For example, I know some teachers say things like "Don't show me what you had for breakfast!" or "Hold in those pizza rolls!" to instruct dancers to hold in their stomachs. Those kinds of phrases are unhelpful on a number of levels. First, they usually cause dancers to "suck in" rather than engage their centers. Second, a sensitive dancer could easily interpret such a correction as a comment about her weight. Third, they make eating food seem like a bad thing for a dancer to do. Finally, they're just squicky and weird.

Instead, I say things like "draw your belly button in" for younger dancers or just "engage your abdominals" for older students. There are so many ways of giving this correction (or similar ones) without being crazy and demeaning.

If I hear a student saying something negative about a part of her (or his) body, I try to jump in with something positive to counteract it like saying they have beautiful long arms, or strong legs or a nice line in a position. It seems sort of silly, meaningless even, but I really believe these small things can make a big difference in how an adolescent girl sees herself, especially if she gets a lot of criticism about her appearance or abilities at home or school.

Along with speaking positively about others' bodies, we dance teachers need to be careful how we speak about our own appearance in front of our students. It's tempting to be self-deprecating for a laugh or just because we're not feeling that great about ourselves on a particular day. But remember that these girls are watching your behavior and listening to your words. Create a healthy, encouraging environment and you'll cultivate healthy, confident dancers.