Movement Inspiration 12/23/2013 Dance
Dance has been largely ignored in the natural movement movement, which is a major oversight, dance is a cultural universal and develops incredibly early, children will start bobbing and clapping to music before they can walk, my daughter was one.
I ignored dance for years, viewing it as effeminate in my youth, the more I studied movement though the more amazed by dancers I was; many forms of dance offer incredibly complete movement educations developing, speed, power, strength, mobility stamina, and incredible levels of movement complexity. I took a series of advanced modern dance classes recently what most astonished me was the ability of the dancers to absorb new movement material, the teacher would start with phrases of 6-8 movement including, spinning, leaping and ground movement, these sequences were just the building blocks of the larger routines and the expectation was that you would pick up the movement automatically so that the teacher could focus teaching how to embody emotion and respond to the music with the movement.
I had no idea why the teacher let me continue in the class and I eventually decided to retry at a lower level but it changed my whole perception of the capacity for humans too development movement facility.
Many years earlier I had conversation with cirque de soleil recruiter who told me that Capoeiristas were the athletes who were most able to solve new movement challenges, more so then gymnasts or freerunners.
We speculated that it was due to the completeness of Capoeira in demanding exceptional strength, mobility and complexity of movement like gymnastics but also demanding improvisational ability, rythm and response to music and the capacity to interact with a partner.
My own dancing is not yet ready to be published so for now enjoy this amazing video of dancer acrobat and capoeirista Andrea Catozzi
Today I want you to find some time to dance, if your a parkour guy turn some music on and practice flow see if you can flow with the rhythm. Dance is a wonderful thing to work on because the aspect of rhythm and response to music can be developed with minimal impact on recovery. So make a habit of getting a little bit of dance in every day. I have ritual now every morning of dancing with my daughter listening to doo woop music.
