Posture!
When we see that word, a lot of us spring to attention: lift our chests, throwour shoulder blades back, our shoulders up, tighten our necks, suck in our bellies and raise our heads while attempting to “straighten our spines”. Proper posture, we think, is not-slouching; it’s also, apparently, waiting for a punch in the gut.
But good posture isn’t even one universal thing. Posture, like fitness, is activity-specific. The posture that works for an activity depends on what matters most:
- what’s visually striking
- what produces emotion
- what generates the most power or action
- what requires least extra effort to do, or is most efficient
- what’s least painful
- what’s most natural, and most sustainable
As a performer, I’ve learned a slightly different language to talk about the shape of the body: posture is a form we put on (perhaps a physical character, perhaps just a neutral, ready state); alignment is a practice of removing impediments to movement. Posture, then, is about presentation, the first half of that list.
Alignment is about health, the second half. I find this differentiation profoundly useful in my own understanding of dance training. Dancers spend a great deal of time adopting posture, and rarely train in alignment. Your body needs both to be your best possible performance vehicle. You can force dance posture and maaaaaybe get it right without first attending to your own alignment issues, but you’ll never have a truly neutral body to start with.
How to get aligned in three easy intentions
There are tons of techniques and practices that get you into good alignment – chiropractic and Rolfing try to bring you there from the outside, yoga and tai chi spend attention on this, many martial & modern dance traditions do, too. And. There are a few schools of body work almost exclusively focused on you finding your own perfect alignment. My favorite practice for understanding alignment is the Alexander Technique. You can read and try some exercises online.
Part one. Your head. Alexander teachers tend to start with this litany:
Alexander starts with the head in part because human development, at least of the spinal curve, starts with the head. We develop from the head down and from the spine out. Try it. Imagine your head is unbelievably light, a balloon on a string. Float it around on your neck a bit. My current Alexander teacher likes to remind us that our spines continue well up underneath our skulls – not in the back, mind you; we’ve got our heads on a nice little hingey floaty thing at the top of our necks.
Part two. Your shoulders. Do as little as possible with your shoulders. Don’t hold your shoulders in any place, don’t shift your shoulder blades back, don’t push your shoulder socket down, just try to feel a sense that your shoulders are wide, deep, and released. Try letting your arms just hang at your sides; looking at yourself sideways in a mirror, they want to fall about halfway between your front & back.
Part three. And then check out your neck. Lots of us like to lift our chins crazy high and crunch the poor backs of our necks. Pretty hard to float our heads that way, though – heads are heavy! You want to keep your giant head balanced on something nice and springy like your spine, not try to hold it up with the sheer strength of your neck and shoulder muscles. One thing I love about Alexander is how gentle the practice is. No drill sergeants, no snaps to attention, just doing what you’re built to do. You needn’t even do this rigorously. Every time you draw your attention to the position of your spine with these intentions, you get a little more comfortable.
Alignment in action
Speaking of your springy spine! It’s not straight. It starts in this adorable little C-curve when you are tiny. You can feel this curve now if you’re sitting in a chair: look at your own sternum & let your chin roll under your head. You can really get into it by letting your upper back follow the curve of your neck, and go even further by letting your hips roll under you, so you’re, you know in the shape of a C.
Your head, as mentioned, though, is effing huge, and that C-curve makes it awfully hard to hold up your head or walk on two feet under the weight of that thing. So you develop a secondary curve in the other direction in your neck and lower back as a toddler, making you kindof S-shaped. This S-shape thing is why chairs pretty much suck. They discourage the natural curve of your low back, talk you into sitting on your tailbone instead of the place where you’re actually meant to fold in half, convince you that your spine is a straight line, and generally treat you like a puritanical school marm would treat a recalcitrant child. Chairs hate you and humanity. Even ergonomically designed chairs, though much springier & a bit less school-marmish, are still designed for a hypothetical average (cismale) person’s build and curve. For sitting, then: do not accept advice from the backs of chairs. Put your feet on the floor. Find your sit-bones & sit on those. Most likely you won’t even reach the back of a chair to have it smack you with a ruler.
The S-shape also applies while standing, walking, and that sort of stuff. Obviously. Your spine is okay moving in a lot of different directions, but it has a definite preference for being S-curved front-to-back and more-or-less stable right-to-left.
When coming to a healthy standing alignment, I like to start from my feet, a habit learned from centering practice in performance and martial arts.
Feel the weight of the body in both the heels and the balls of the feet (but not so much the sides or middle), and without any twisty feelings in the ankles – that usually requires having the toes pointed forward, not turned out. Swaying the body to feel weight in different parts of the foot helps me get a bit more centered on them. Let the knees feel springy but not really bent. And then find a neutral place where the pelvis feels balanced over your feet. My former dance teaching partner illustrated this by bouncing from right to left hip, then making a little pelvic thrust (as lewd as you like, it’s your pelvis).
Applying it to dance
And now to apply this to bellydance. The alignment you just found (if you went through all that) is not dance posture. It’s state of being that you can hang out in for conditioning drills, for joint rotations, for chilling at home or being at work. That makes it a nice neutral place from which you can now approach the dance posture of your choice. Why do we even adopt extra-daily postures for dancing? Well, they’re pretty, for one. A lot of bellydance postural strategies are about creating a longer torso line, more pronounced hip movements. Style- or form-specific application of tension and distortion to neutral alignment can also project an aura or character.
Good alignment underneath a posture choice, though, serves you in several ways. First, you hurt yourself a lot less – starting from a healthy position can reduce the impact of performing movements incorrectly or inefficiently, and you do want the option to perform inefficiently (what if your character is wounded, for instance?). You minimize the extra work you do to maintain your dance when you take advantage of the design of your body for basic tasks like standing.
This has served me enormously in adopting the posture of ATS, which actually uses a lot of good-for-you natural alignment anyhow. The main freakiness of ATS is the lifted chest and arms. By strengthening the abdominal and back muscles used to hold the chest lift & then thinking about both the chest and arms as supported by that S-curve, I expend way less energy in the work of holding up my arms all the time. Starting from good alignment also works nicely in other styles – the weight-on-heels, tucked-pelvis approach to torso-lengthening, for instance, works better if you remember that your spine is still all S-ified. I’ve also been playing with the idea of that new shape as a different kind of spring (bending the knees becomes very important here), making it uniquely stable for things like level changes. That neutral alignment gives you more choices, too – once you are aware of your body’s shape in space, you can make intentional decisions about what to do with it.
How many of us see photo or video of our performances and are mildly horrified by where our arms are? Or our chests, our butts – name a part and you can lose awareness of it on stage. Training in alignment is also training in proprioception, your mental understanding of your presence in physical space. It’s a profoundly useful tool for dance training, as you learn to feel your way through space and your own body.