Specialty Wkshop: Musicality Intensive

Lead by Stephanie, this workshop is for intermediate to advanced lovers of urban kiz. To be a great dancer, you need to exercise your ears and understanding of musical structure, timing, rhythm, phrasing, parts of music, how to focus on one thing at a time, how to dance to percussion vs lyrics/vocals, cadence, duration of sound, highs and lows, harmonization/chords and their sounds, flow, imitating syllables without understanding the language, punctuation, accentuation, internalization/visualization, instrumentation (what is playing the particular sound), genre, cultural clues,how to dance with feeling, how to control your energy and touch, breath, and so on. By knowing all this, you can predict what will happen in the music. As a leader, you can organize your moves and movements much more precisely when you can visualize and predict what is coming. You can become the instrument, you can enhance what you already hear, you can abstain or hold, you can do a technical move and go to basic timing without expressing the music. As a follower, you aren't always sure what will happen next, but you can get a pretty good idea if you know your partner well, and if you know how they hear the music. But then you will hover in intermediate mediocrity land if you dont add your own feeling and expression to your moves and movements. You need to be accountable for your own musicality, don't underestimate its power (to freedom in dance!). We'll go through exercises to tune in, feel, 'see' in your mind's eye. You'll close your eyes, you will dance eyes closed, you will focus less on leading and following and listen way more. The best thing you can do is do a lot of active listening while sitting and wearing headphones, while being aware of everything playing at once. Can you catch it all? Do you get too excited and lose focus? Stephanie has danced all her life, and leared to play the piano 8 yrs, viola 5 yrs, congas and other Latin percussion over many years. In 2006 she came out with a timing dvd for students of Latin dance, and has since given countless workshops on musicality in partner dance. Sunday Nov 10th 3:00pm- 4:30pm $25 includes everything til 11pm Specialty workshop - please don't be late!!!