One of the problems I see a lot with my students is the inability to understand when they are "sitting in their hip", or if they do realize it, they aren't sure how to correct it.  For a lot of dancers, sitting in the supporting side hip happens when they are concentrating on a combination, fatigued, or trying to keep their hips square (but trying the wrong thing).

If students develop a strong supporting side and are working on it consistently, muscle memory will often kick in to help…

In the summer, i'm often fortunate to have some small classes with students who are open minded about exploring a dance concept throughout a class and in one of these the focus that evolved was about the concept of the supporting leg and how active it really is when used correctly.  Over a couple of blog posts, I'm going to give some of the exercises I used to help students connect with their standing sides during class.

This series of exercises is done on a foam roller. The…

I'm not a huge fan of the taste of coffee, so it really surprised me that I liked the coffee drink that came in one of my juice cleanse orders.  If you are a coffee lover, you might find that you want a stronger coffee flavor in this smoothie.  At the ridiculous prices (and often scary nutritional info) of getting coffee out, I played around with making mine.

The recipe comes in 2 parts - making the cold brew coffee and then making the smoothie itself.  It's written out for a quantity…

Recently, at a large dance teacher's convention, I was fortunate enough to have time off from teaching to both take classes from other teachers and to observe dancers and teachers in class.  One thing that struck me was the lack of focus on proper alignment in starting positions.  While these often subtle differences don't  usually cause an injury, they do set the body up for less than optimal movement - why would we want to prepare our students for class this way?

Since many warm ups…