Does Contemporary Dance Require Flexibility? A Cool Question in Bangalore!
Does contemporary dance require flexibility? Really?
Well, what does flexibility mean for you?
Let us do a physical guided meditation together. Now that you are scrolling, spend a few seconds with us doing this meditation. Stand up where you are. How is your chest postured? Can you open it out and raise your shoulders along with stretching your arms up? Can you open your jaws full that automatically raises your chin and your head muscles? Maybe you could elevate your spine and feel joy around it? Engage your thoracic diaphragm, and take a deep breath in and out. Can you stretch your legs and hold your core?
In fact, you were simply doing a full body stretch with a yawn (or pandiculation, strictly speaking) with us, providing you the joy of relaxing your body! A flexible body is just a relaxed body in all its body joints as one’s first nature.
Through contemporary dance, we go flexible. So, it is about starting with the process and let the outcome happen as a byproduct.
Does Contemporary Dance Require Flexibility: How We Move
We move by moving our skeleton with help from our muscular structure. Our spinal cord is designed in a way that we are innately flexible. However, technology has shown its bad effect on our joints and muscles. We spend most of our time in a chair. Our posture in its spine has gone stiff with the passage of time. We have forgotten our body’s ability to move freely. Back in the day, we as a species used to climb trees. We did all our household chores by ourselves. We would run in fields, carry buckets of water and hang on the branches of tress.
Can you imagine how we Homo sapiens turned bipedal, freeing our spine in a vertical orientation? Can you imagine how flexibility and strength used to be our core innate qualities? Well, where all of that freedom we achieved from our flexible spine is disappearing? Is it on your laptop and mobile screens now? Is it on a dusted chair? Aren’t we tired and exhausted with sitting in that couch?
Does Contemporary Dance Require Flexibility: How We Go Rigid
Well, let me make it clear? None of this is bad. However, if we make it our first nature and keep coping with our stressors, we go rigid in our spine. Its not about all or nothing, it is about coping alone. But at the same time, we don’t realize what we really need to deal with. What are we fighting with and fawning from? Can we thrive instead of just surviving? Can we be flexible in our bodies and our minds? Can we be adaptive as we used to be when we were primitive beings? Can we unlearn and then relearn what this modern world expects us to be like?
We have forgotten how we have evolved to move freely in our entire body. We struggle to move our joints. We exchange memes showing how at age 30 we have a traumatized body, backaches, diseases, and call it normal. The fault is not in us. The fault is in the system.
Does Contemporary Dance Require Flexibility: How Contemporary Dance Helps
We, at FLUX, believe in a systematic individual change. We believe that trauma is not our fault but healing is certainly our responsibility.
Our understanding of contemporary dance at FLUX has been through our lived experiences. And we celebrate our uniqueness through our X sense and our courageous spines. Contemporary dance provides freedom with flow in its essence and natural authentic expression of the body. It’s achieved with techniques that helps us ground, balance, and fly. It includes floor work, partner work, improvisation, core fortification, spine movement, body flexibility, strengthening, release technique in its choreography.
Contemporary dance embraces various school of dance and is a non-restrictive form. It lets us flow and takes shape that our bodies choose as expressions of our innermost desires, movement and freedom. Unlike classical traditional forms, it is not restricted with rules. It keeps the mind body connection as the centre and the axis through which we pivot, ground and flow. We move to what moves us. Contemporary dance is the way of life. It teaches us to be the explorer of our own bodies and souls where we become an intuitive being.
Contemporary dance increases our flexibility, mobility, agility, the range in our motions opening our body and lets us expand. It frees us from the shackles of our mind and introduces a world of possibilities and openness.
Does Contemporary Dance Require Flexibility: How Flexibility Helps Us
Flexibility helps in improving posture. It helps us align our body as an aesthetic appearance when it comes to contemporary dance. It makes our movement fluid, sharp and elegant and graceful. It helps us in increasing the efficiency of our movements.
Flexibility also helps us in managing stress. All physical activity helps in releasing endorphins and dopamine and thus channels our physical and mental stress through movement. It eases muscle tension that we habitually keep contracted. We stretch our muscles leading to opening our bodies and releasing the tension. It releases our suppressed emotions and all the traumas stored deep within in the body. It heals us inside out.
It helps us prevent accidents and injuries. The body’s way of learning new postures is unlearning the wrong postures first and then relearning the right ones. When the body is exhausted or does movement in a wrong and harmful way, we need to unlearn it first. Then we learn what to do and what not to do and do it in the right aligned way.
Does Contemporary Dance Require Flexibility: Body Awareness
Body awareness and mental clarity help us in breaking patterns physically and mentally. These are the gateway to clarity and mindfulness. They help us being in present with our environment and body.
It helps in acquiring balance and stability. It increases our range of motion with mobility and agility.
It also helps in blood circulation, slow joint degeneration, better sleep, appetite and overall well-being.
At FLUX, how do we embrace flexibility in Our contemporary dance program X-Sense?
Does Contemporary Dance Require Flexibility: Modus Operandi
We start with warm ups, do yoga stretches, work on our glutes, our core, and our hip flexors. We listen to our body and let our bodies communicate to us. Also, we engage and release, grow through community support and use stretching accessories with yoga and Pilates. Lastly, we focus on breath work, take safety precautions and discern between perceived safety and real safety. This leads us to discern between perceived threats and real threats. That’s how we set small goals one by one and complete them sequentially.
- Here is a list of flexible skills we develop:
- leg swings
- arm circles
- push ups
- controlled kicks
- grounding
- spine flow
- torso twists and turns
- circularity from head to toe
We do them all.
We turn static flexibility to dynamic flexibility.
And we cool down sometimes with a massage session among students.
So, are you flexible enough in your minds and bodies?
Well, we start with the body at FLUX and the mind follows.
As our beloved founder of FLUX school of Arts, Sahiba Singh says: Fluidity is strength, rigidity is weakness.
Come, experience this dynamic change at FLUX! We are in a constant state of flux with flexibility and adaptability. We will see you on the floor and stretching at our walls with humor and pain together. We will get into a split and talk about life at our leisure. See you at FLUX!
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X Sense: Our Flagship Professional Contemporary Dance Course in Bangalore