Author: bettechamberlin

Happy New Year! – Ballet and Latin anyone?

Posted on | by bettechamberlin

Hey Dancers,

Wishing you all a very Happy New Year with many exciting ballroom dancing moments in the coming year.

Here’s Ivan and I blending my ballet experience (considerably more than Ivan’s!) and his Latin experience (well, definitely more than mine!) into a short piece to music from Act 3 of “Swan Lake”.

Both of us are working in a less comfortable dance zone which is what I love about this!  My study of ballroom dancing which started at ‘a more mature age’ was greatly facilitated by my Alexander Technique certification 15 years ago and teaching since then.

With the tools that I learned, I was able to apply a learned, comprehensive approach to a vastly different movement landscape (ballroom dancing) with less struggle both physically and mentally.

I now work with both ballroom and ballet dancers, helping them to apply an approach to movement that distills muscular effort down – or depending on a person’s need, ramps it up – to a level that reduces discomfort, creates ease and uprightness (posture), and carries over to improved functioning in all daily activities.

Check out this blog  It explains more about how learning to improve your ballroom dancing also improves your daily functioning.

If you find this intriguing, book a lesson with me, either on zoom.com or if you are in the NY/NJ area at my studio in Montclair, NJ.  Please use my contact form, tell me about yourself and leave your availability.  I will respond within 24 hours.

Happy Dancing!   If you know other dancers who may benefit from reading my blog, please forward.

If you haven’t received it already,  get my free e-booklet 10 Steps to Competitive Greatness here.

Down the rabbit hole..how to get comfortable with the uncomfortable

Posted on | by bettechamberlin

Rabbit Hole: the definition from ‘the free dictionary.’

To enter into a situation or begin a process or journey that is particularly strange, problematic, difficult, complex, or chaotic, especially one that becomes increasingly so as it develops or unfolds

I’m not thinking about the political meaning, used nowadays to describe the current conditions which are some or all of the above.

I’m thinking lately about the parallels between Alice’s adventures (down the rabbit hole) and the process of continual change that we are faced with, including the positive changes we want to make in our dancing.

Change is inevitable even when that change is avoided, yet unavoidable.

Change #1 – Inconvenient, unwanted, yet unquestionably necessary

Lately, I’ve been particularly annoyed by the many traffic detours I’v been forced to endure.  If I wanted to get to where I was going, I had to go along with the detour (change).  I’m almost positive that, if you drive, you have them too.  (Even if you don’t drive yourself, you’ve been effected by them).  Alice too was confronted by the sudden upheaval of her fall down the well.

This is an example of unavoidable change.  After many days of frustration, I remembered to leave 10 minutes earlier than usual to account for the darned annoyance.

Change #2 – Exploring the benefits of unnecessary change

But what about change that is not essential, avoided  because of a certain comfort with the familiar, regardless of whether or not that familiar is working for you anymore.  We don’t have to make changes just because we or in many cases, others, have an inkling that we should.

I wrote in my last blog about how I was in my own rabbit hole while learning cuban hip action.  Yes, strange,problematic, difficult, complex, resulting in a chaotic brain.  And for awhile, the chaos did increase. 

The discomfort I experienced, trying to get comfortable with this new movement pattern was discombobulating and frustrating.

My body and mind insisted on figuring it out based on my habitual known cues.

Oh dear. That was not working.

It wasn’t until I stopped seeking a familiar feeling and basically trusted that I’d best let myself be uncomfortable as part of the process, that my whole body started to cooperate.

For the past 15 years,  F. M. Alexander’s discovery has enlightened my own kinesthetic discovery and has enabled me to help my students discover their own.

Here are 3 things that you can do right now to help make the changes you want whether it is to feel  comfortable in a new ballroom style or movement challenge, adopt healthier eating habits,  or stop negative thinking in its tracks.

1.  Believe that change is not possible without giving up that familiar comfortable feeling.  It is your habit and it’s not going away by keeping it front and center.  It will always be there, but give yourself a chance to feel foolish or just plain dumbfounded.

2.  Get support from others.  Verbalize what you are trying to change and ask for feedback and patience.

3.  Be aware of the moment that you are stimulated to react habitually and stop consciously.  Give it a moment to flounder.  Then act by responding with a different, more efficient (yet wrong feeling!) result.

This is what I can help you with.  Making changes for the better can be daunting, but  I have been down the rabbit hole and can tell you that it is a fruitful trip if you can open yourself up to curiosity and the unfamiliarity that can come with it.

If you find this intriguing, book a lesson with me, either on zoom.com or if you are in the NY/NJ area at my studio in Montclair, NJ.  Please use my contact form, tell me about yourself and leave your availability.  I will respond within 24 hours.

Happy Dancing!   If you know other dancers who may benefit from reading my blog, please forward.

To get my free e-booklet 10 Steps to Competitive Greatness, click here.

 

 

The Unexpected Benefits of Uninformed Choices – Horror, Ballroom and more!

Posted on | by bettechamberlin

At an age much greater than that lived by most college students, I went back to school to finish my undergraduate degree.  I can’t say it was a bucket list item to check off, more, it was a glaring unfinished endeavor that had plagued my psyche for awhile.  I don’t know why, it was just one of those personal stirrings that I could no longer ignore.  This was not an UNinformed choice- it was super informed.

But, as I navigated through the various coursework, writing papers, preparing discussions and such, I discovered that indeed, there were some Unexpected Benefits of Uninformed Choices.

Here is one:

My foray into the course, Dark Dreams:  Studying the Horror film was facilitated by my college mentor who described it as worthwhile and as I understood it “fun”.  I thought, ‘fun is good!’  I had imagined watching films of King Kong swiping airplanes, holding Fay Wray atop the Empire State building.  Or maybe Godzilla (that was a Japanese horror film – I knew that), or reviewing the empathetic monster created by Frankenstein.  These were all more or less fun horror films.  But as the course progressed, I learned that fun was not an accurate description of what I was about to experience.

Now I had to suffer through the horror of blood, gore and psychological scarring and write about it through a Freudian looking glass. I had no idea how I was going to do this, but somehow I did and that uninformed choice, although one wrought with a degree of suffering I had not expected turned out to be my most fulfilling class.

It reminded me of starting ballroom dancing 12 years ago at the beginning of the “Dancing with the Stars” craze.  Since I was a professional ballet dancer  and hadn’t danced for many years, I decided how fun and easy it would be, I always wanted to explore it and ballet was so rigorous.  Ballroom, although in high heels was not balancing on point and doing multiple pirouettes with and without a partner.  I mean, how hard could learning and performing the rumba be?  As it turned out, very.

Frustrating days filled with total confusion on hip action – Cuban motion – what’s that?  I was told I was doing Fosse style (remember Cabaret?). Well , that I was told was not even close.   And the worst part – my ballet training was often a hindrance – I was stiff as a board.

But I threw myself into my Latin dancing and admitted that it was not easy and forced myself to feel unfamiliar until my committed work  paid off  – the result being that I placed well in my competitions. And  I had fun.  But I’m still working on being less of a scientist dancer and more the risk taking stylist I desire.

Maybe there is an opportunity for you to pull the trigger on something that you desire but is easily discarded by thinking long and hard about it. Maybe that showcase idea you had that felt exciting was abandoned as too weird or difficult. Megan Macedo, a marketing coach in the style of “be yourself” asks these questions while desperately trying to find her own calling AND being a good girl at the same time.   “Why did I have to question everything? Why was I always analyzing my life and my choices? Why didn’t I have the blind obedience or dumb confidence that seemed to stand others in such good stead in life? Why was everything always so complicated for me?

Such is the guarantee that in life that which is unexpected, difficult, sometimes horrifying, and frustrating often turns out to be fulfilling, enlightening, and worthwhile.  I learn this again and again by finding myself in situations often thought to be one thing and discovering something different altogether.  I actually wish that I had done this more often, not played it safe and as Eleanor Roosevelt so profoundly stated, “do that which we think we cannot”.

Happy Dancing!   If you would like to book a lesson with me, please use my contact form, tell me about yourself and leave your availability.  I will respond within 24 hours.

If you know other dancers who may benefit from reading my blog, please forward.

To get my free UPDATED booklet “10 Steps to Competitive Greatness” in PDF format, click here.

 

 

Competition is one big Bolero (Ravel’s)

Posted on | by bettechamberlin

 Getting ready for a competition is  like listening to Ravel’s Bolero -it starts out quietly builds up in volume adding instruments along the way, repeats …building a driving theme and finally ends in a crescendo that reverberates as much in its percussive ending as the silence that follows.

Tomorrow I’m competing in the Fred Astaire  Whippany competition. I’m remembering how the getting ready part each time is a shock – I’ve conveniently forgotten from the last time the things that need to be done as a preparation before the competition.  It’s a lot, and I know from others they feel it too.  We forget each time, much like the excitement of an upcoming vacation highjacked by overwhelm while trying not to forget to pack anything vital.

The day of, or the night before there is a mental and physical expenditure of energy culminating in a crescendo – the actual comp. And let’s not forget all the stuff that comprises that build up:

  1. Remember to bring dress(es), shirts/pants, shoes, makeup, jewelry, tanning supplies, hair stuff, good snacks and a slew of other things…..
  2. Choose warm up 1 hour before dancing.  (I like a combo of yoga, gyrokinesis, and actual dancing).
  3. Try not to freak out while going over routines sans partner when you can’t recall what comes next.
  4. Stay focused on your technique while being completely saturated in the sytle of dance; romance, flirtation, strong and assertive attitudes, hip action, softness, agressiveness, lightness, grounding.
  5. Maintain the style of the dance throughout.
  6. Before bedtime go over your routines outside of the bedroom.  You will be less likely to do it while you are supposed to be sleeping.

 

I was inspired to write this during a lesson with one of my dance teacher students  when we spoke about her daughter’s difficult role in the ballet Bolero. The choreography matched the driving nature of the music, non stop and relentless starting slowly and working its way towards a crescendo which meant that the most intense part was at the beginning of the halfway point. For the entire 26 minutes, she was on stage   Her comment:  “I feel like vomiting”.

Well that is an unpleasant feeling!  Especially while trying to express beauty in movement.  In this instance, I encourage a complete assessment of energy output, efficiency of muscular use – tossing out excessive contraction.  Adding more breath and pacing yourself.  This is has to be done in the rehearsal as the adrenaline present in performance can be a negative if it is coupled with too much doing.

It’s always fun to rediscover something long forgotten, something that was wonderful, something that created a sea change in the artistic world and screams. Torvill and Dean were champion ice dancers in the 1984 Olympics and they were the first to perform to one complete piece of music, uncut by a mix of music selections  that were so common.  Their music:  Bolero. (It was not the complete Ravel Bolero at 5 minutes but the drama of the piece was there).

Notice the ease and flow of their dancing, simplicity, passion and musicality.  The synergy between them looks energy saving.  They dance as one.  You can watch Torvill and Dean’s performance here.  Enjoy!

If you know other dancers who may benefit from reading my blog, please forward.

To get my free 10 Steps to Competitive Greatness in PDF format, click here.  Stay tuned for my upcoming expanded FREE booklet on the 10 Steps!

 

 

Awareness in the moment may save your life

Posted on | by bettechamberlin

The New York Times did not report the Las Vegas shooting in the Monday morning edition – it happened late Sunday night on East Coast time. My dentist told me Monday morning shaking his head in disbelief.

I was shocked at the number of people killed – 50, and I am sure with hundreds wounded there will be more (as of this writing now 59). It is emerging that life around the world and particularly in the United States has changed forever.

The wild wild west never ended in the United States.  The weapons are more destructive today and capable of killing quickly and efficiently. And the same sense of retribution through being ‘wronged’ and going straight to violence doesn’t seem to have faded. 

These high powered assault weapons are being sold to civilians every day with few questions asked.  These acts could largely be prevented if not for the easy availability of weapons that are designed for war.

And there are fewer and fewer places we can feel safe.  Events that attract people wanting to have fun and forget about the ever troubling violence in our culture are now subject to the very thing they are trying to escape.  Large scale events, inside and in this case, outside, schools, houses of worship – the very places that are designed to be sanctuaries have been victims of unspeakable violence.

What struck me while listening to a reporter speaking about the many people who were shot was this:  After hearing shots and seeing people flee, many froze looking for where the shots were coming from or imagining they were fireworks.   He made the point that they were lacking an awareness of what was happening in the moment and not taking immediate action, which resulted in many deaths and injuries.  This may or not be the case, but it makes me wonder what I would do in this situation.  I’d like to think that the sound of ‘firecrackers’ should not be trusted outside of an event that explicitly announces them.

This reminds me of a powerful story told to me by a good friend whose husband who worked in the second tower of the World Trade Tower on 9/11.  He escaped the second plane hitting his office on the 90th floor.  Because he witnessed the first plane hit the first tower, he quickly decided to get  out of the building, against the convincing – yet sadly inappropriate advice of the security personnel on his floor.

He tried to convince many of his coworkers  to follow him – some did – but the ones who did not perished.  It pains me to think about this.  As it turned out, while running down the stairs at the 56th floor the second plane struck, he continued down to the ground level just in time to exit before the tower came down.  Acting immediately and definitively saved his life.

The tragedy is that the more people who don’t act immediately, the more others do the same. This is commonly called crowd psychology. This field relates to the behaviors and thought processes of both the individual crowd members and the crowd as an entity.[1] “Crowd behavior is heavily influenced by the loss of responsibility of the individual and the impression of universality of behavior, both of which increase with the size of the crowd”.[2][3]

Becoming acutely aware of what is happening in the moment could save time when it matters.  And that could save your and your loved ones life.

Stay aware, be safe……

……and keep dancing.

I sincerely hope that no one who reads this was affected in any way by the events in Las Vegas.

If you know other dancers who may benefit from reading my blog, please forward.

To get my free 10 Steps to Competitive Greatness in PDF format, click here.  Stay tuned for my upcoming expanded FREE booklet on the 10 Steps!

 

The other side of a simple plan

Posted on | by bettechamberlin

I’m wondering, “how do we plan?”

We plan our schedules, what competition or showcase to do, what costume to buy/rent, what food to buy, what car to buy, who to marry (one of the more involved ones I dare say!) and the list goes on.

Plans can be for the purpose of organizing, working through a problem and setting short term and long term plans which often become goals.  Goals exist  to push us towards thinking about what we want, what satisfies our psyche.

Personally, I always hated making long term goals – it scared me because I was afraid of making the wrong goal!

How crazy is that?!

Being a dancer/arts program type of person without business acumen, I felt comfortable being a responder rather than a pro active planner.

But by setting a goal, I’ve learned that I can commit to it in a way that then allows me to rethink, or abandon it altogether opening the door to something new and more meaningful.  Changing our goals can be the best plan.

The alternative is to be swayed by culture, parents, friends, bosses and the many other influences that we can be too heavily dependent upon.    That is not to say that these are not valid influences, rather that they are contributing  factors that color the outline that is created by us and us alone.

It’s interesting that the goal I set for myself many years ago – becoming certified in the Alexander Technique – helped to clarify the making of long term plans by learning to make very short term, in the moment plans.

Stay with me here!

By using a simple plan to initiate movement (e.g. a lunge)  by lengthening, and not contracting into that movement, I discovered a template for facilitating a change in general, including the process of deciding a longer term goal, like finishing my college degree decades after I started.

In dancing terms, while recognizing that I was losing my uprightness while working on hip action, I put in place my practiced plan to use my brain/thinking to counter this habit of contracting.  It was such a wonderful relief to have a simply worded plan that I could call upon, whenever I chose.

And here’s where the other side of a simple plan comes in.  The simple plan; to use words that say “yes I want to do this instead of this” was effective yet continually challenged by the feeling that my old familiar habit was right!!.

Changing habits is never a quick process, but an incredibly worthwhile one.  The method that I have learned to help you to address all matter of physical challenges is contained in a mental box full of wonderful new tools that improve health, promote a sense of ease and a reduction of pain and discomfort.

This is what I do, create a mind to body environment that includes a simple plan, easily implemented by you, along with my guiding hands.

If you have back/neck/shoulder pain that hasn’t responded to conventional methods and would like to learn more, book a lesson with me to decide if what I love to do can help you and your ballroom dancing.  Please use my contact form, tell me about yourself and leave your availability.  I will respond within 24 hours.

Happy Dancing!   If you know other dancers who may benefit from reading my blog, please forward.

To get my free 10 Steps to Competitive Greatness in PDF format, click here.  Stay tuned for my upcoming expanded FREE booklet on the 10 Steps!

Self approval – you’re in charge!

Posted on | by bettechamberlin

I remember when I was a 10 year old ballet student being carted around by my teacher and mother to various dance conventions sometimes meeting important other teachers and choreographers .  They were trying to assess or confirm my talent via other professionals.  I sometimes felt bandied about as a fish would be judged fresh or not based on its  clear, not cloudy eyes.

Perhaps it was fair and reasonable to believe that they were doing the right thing. But to me, I felt like an exhibit.  What overwhelmed my experience was a need for approval from those in a position to confirm what my teacher and mother had already surmised about my talent.  I’m still not sure if I needed approval or I needed approval for them.

Ten year olds need validation, mostly in order to know that they are pleasing their parents/teachers/caregivers.  This is probably a healthy attitude in that the opposite – completely out of control rebelliousness would be disruptive at the least and psychologically concerning in its excess.

But still, a bit of rebelling can teach us what is important , setting boundaries by rejecting ideals and behavior that clearly don’t apply to our learned experience of ourselves and what makes us tick, and what makes for contentment.

Dancing – whether in your living room, ballroom or other events like parties or weddings – is  at the end of the day an expression of YOU.  There is only one of you, as we have heard so many times.  Self approval is our only real guide if we believe in the uniqueness of ourselves.

In ballroom terms, there is no set amount of time that behooves us to learn a routine, improve our hip action or arm styling or lose weight.  Sure it’s nice to set a goal, but that goal may be better served  by basing it on the reality of our own self approval rating.  It is easier to use another’s guide than formulate our own – that is work. Work that believes in the truth of self approval.  (This is not to say that all of us approve of all of our behavior all the time!)

Even if you don’t have a ‘pleasing others’ orientation, our culture tends to encourage achievement levels that are often random in their relentlessness and insistent on prescribed fast results with no room for exploration and failure – for more on my take on failure click here.

I found that I often, and unknowingly don’t even need a person to look for approval, I have the cultural energy field of approval!

One of my favorite quotes concerning this topic is this one from Mark Twain:

“We can secure other people’s approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that” — Mark Twain 

If you find this intriguing, book a lesson with me, either on zoom.com or if you are in the NY/NJ area at my studio in Montclair, NJ.  Please use my contact form, tell me about yourself and leave your availability.  I will respond within 24 hours.

Happy Dancing!   If you know other dancers who may benefit from reading my blog, please forward.

To get my free 10 Steps to Competitive Greatness in PDF format, click here.

Beautiful ballroom dancing – are we adding or subtracting something?

Posted on | by bettechamberlin

If we take beauty as a constant, describing everything from flowers to trees to faces to dancing, we may wonder if beauty is really a distilling down, a reduction of add-ons, encumbrances and wasted effort.

Trees, plants and flowers all must bloom, die, shed and then grow again.  It is a perpetual process of renewal.  What is beautiful about this process is it all comes from an organic base where nothing else is added in each cycle.  Only what is needed.

You may say, but what about all the stuff gardeners do to make flowers, plants and trees stay healthy – like fertilizers, water and sprays?  That’s true and I like to compare that to our support system which includes dresses, makeup and hair, shoes, massages and whatnot that we do to accentuate our beautiful dancing.

I often use this idea as a way of illustrating to my husband that the renewal process is all around us in nature, so why shouldn’t it be a part of the way we, as humans live?  In other words, the forgotten, dusty, broken items in the garage are begging to be cleared away and an empty space or new item in it’s place. (Still working on this!%&*!).

The same goes for dancing.

True, there is no dancing if there are no steps, no framework, no separate styles to inform our movement.  This is what our ballroom teachers give us.  But if we find obstacles as we rehearse for our comps/showcases,  this paves the way for recognizing what is getting in the way, not needed, superfluous, whatever you want to call it.

This, along with my own ballroom dancing is my passion –  helping people to uncover what is obstructing free movement and what to do about it once found.  The solution is  trusting that new thinking can change our muscular actions.

If you find this intriguing, book a lesson with me, either on zoom.com or if you are in the NY/NJ area at my studio in Montclair, NJ.  Please use my contact form, tell me about yourself and leave your availability.  I will respond within 24 hours.

Happy Dancing!   If you know other dancers who may benefit from reading my blog, please forward.

To get my free 10 Steps to Competitive Greatness in PDF format, click here.

Can we learn from Animals’ good posture?

Posted on | by bettechamberlin

If you have a dog, cat, horse, or other pet, watch how they move.  Notice how they amble, run, trot, roll, sit, jump, breathe and generally instruct us on their easeful use. They don’t know that they are coordinated, they just are, like little kids. They rely on instinctive behavior.

 Their ‘posture’ is more about moving from one fluid position to another – their bodies working in harmony as a whole.

Take horses, for example.  They are among the most trained animals, for riding, racing, pulling, working.  The equestrian sport dressage is probably the most codified horse training where precise choreography is taught via a synergistic partnership between rider and horse.  It’s easy to draw a parallel between their relationship and the one we all have with our ballroom partners.

Our open and closed routines are examples of the same type of skillfully executed moves performed before judges that record a score for each dance.  The dressage rider leads and the horse follows.  BUT, without an economy of effort and a clear intention on the part of the rider, the synergy fractures and the horse is confused.  Ever been there with your partner – the one who is leading?

In the best of worlds, this will happen at some point – we are human and our minds wander, losing focus in the moment.

Unlike animals whose survival is based on their efficient hunting methods, our modern world doesn’t require that we maintain focus or move well in order to survive on a daily basis.  In our contemporary, industrial culture, familiar habits guide us, often hidden, unconscious and troublesome.

But wouldn’t it be great to have the coordination of a cat, completely in the moment, ready to spring into action with just enough muscular energy to catch that mouse, string or catnip toy?

Here are 4 ways that you can incorporate these animalistic qualities into your dancing:

  1. Be aware of your surroundings (think animal).
  2. Exhale completely.  This will help your next inhale fill your lungs and expand your torso while taking in more oxygen.
  3. Think your neck muscles to release so that your head will continually balance and re-balance on top of your spine.
  4. Cycle through these thoughts as a wish, without tension or judgement.

 

Happy Dancing!   If you would like to book a lesson with me, please use my contact form, tell me about yourself and leave your availability.  I will respond within 24 hours.

If you know other dancers who may benefit from reading my blog, please forward.

To get my free 10 Steps to Competitive Greatness in PDF format, click here.