Intermediate Following

This is a fine-tuning for your body. It’s about creating awareness for every joint and enable different movements to accentuate the music. It’s an amazing way to organize and warm up your body, mind and soul and get comfortable for dancing.
This class includes isolations, from slow to fast, various shapes and some simple combinations. This class will also feature a couple of short improvisations to activate your imagination and experience different qualities of movement.

This is a class about styling and follow voice. We’ll look at isolations and accents to add interest and texture to your dance, and take a moment to think about arms, feet and body shaping – what makes a dance feel beautiful? We’ll do some solo work and partnered work.

This is a class about finding dances of breathtaking synchronicity. Deep listening is HARD, so we’re going to pare it right back, and do a deep dive into tuning fully into your partner above all else, with a focus on moving connection points, and making choices about how you adapt to the connection you’re offered. We’ll be spending a lot of time in close embrace, and teaching with role switching.

This class will offer an in depth exploration on how grooving and rhythmical accents in our body start with the ability to ground (together). As a follower, how can we anchor in one part of my body to free an availability for articulation, impulse, or bounce? We’ll further investigate how it is our specific engagement with gravity that brings the particular quality of the rhythms & timing of the music into our movement and partnership. To balance the vertical & cyclic nature of rhythm, we’ll add some linear flow to play with from our melodic storytelling that we co-create in movement.

How can we use simple movements in a musical way to spice up our dancing steps? We will learn to identify easy rhythmical patterns in songs and use bodymovement elements to get creative without interfering with the connection with our partner.
This class includes exercises to hear different layers of music and explicit movements to express what you hear and feel.

Sometimes you’re given a cue with a lot of scope for interpretation. Sometimes you just don’t know the move being suggested. We’re putting down the panic, and learning to respond with curiosity and delight. Let’s have fun with maintaining the flow of the dance when you need to be creative! This will be taught with role switching.

My classes in this track have taken a journey between 3 modes of following: totally purist, adding follow voice, and making a playful flow. We’re going to look at these as points on a triangle, understand the trade-offs between them and make deliberate choices about which mode to engage at any moment in a dance. This will be taught with role switching.

How do we understand harmony – in music, in our dance partnership, in our own expression? We often intuitively follow the mood or changes in the harmonic structures of music, as they influence and move us profoundly. Though rarely we directly address harmony as one of the musical parameters when exploring musicality. In this class we’ll give it some extra attention to guide our harmonious improvisation together. While playing with dynamics, adaption of tone and the interplay of layers, we’ll be traveling through and following different musical moods to notice how harmony creates itself.