Orientation for Continuing Beginners 1: Alignment Overview

When you have an organized understanding of principles and build on a rock-solid foundation, not only do you get better faster and with less effort, but you have more fun in class and take more satisfaction from your practice. So let’s make sure your ducks are in a row! This course takes a detailed inventory of every Absolute Beginner vocabulary element and concept, and is designed both as a review and refresher for students who have completed Autumn’s Absolute Beginner Course, and as a quick catch-up preparation for continuing beginner students who are coming from classes taught by other teachers. Use this course to discover and fill in any gaps in your expertise, take full ownership of the material you have learned, and move on to Continuing Beginner training from a place of optimal preparation.

Class steps through breakdowns and definitions for: hip rotation; pointing the feet; the 9 landmarks that define stance; basic stance; staggered stance; staying centered and balanced with unequal weight distribution; spiraled stance variations; heel lifts; heel drops as a unit of dance vocabulary; knee bends; the concept of weighted and unweighted movement; and the concept of pushing and lifting.

This program is fully captioned and bookmarked, and replaces an earlier version that was not. Please download the attached PDF for a full transcript, instructions on how to speed up playback, and a hack that might give you subtitles in languages other than English.

Bookmarks for this program:

:19 Locating the hip joints
1:10 Hip Joint Articulations
3:35 Foot Articulation
5:28 9 Landmarks of Stance
6:18 Basic Parallel Stance
8:56 Weight Distribution
10:25 Stage Directions
11:10 Weighted Hip Rotation
12:09 Unweighted Hip Rotation
12:36 Centered Alignment
12:48 Staggered Stance
15:58 Spiraling
18:14 Heel Lifts
20:13 Knee Bends
21:28 Weighted and Unweighted Movement
22:05 Push and Lift
22:36 Review