Kerry Kapaku led a solo jazz workshop today. After watching videos of myself dancing the Trickeration routine (Cole Crutcher taught a class on it a week ago), I was interested in improving my comfort with solo jazz. I’m getting better with reproducing the footwork, but the rest of my body has some catching up to do. My upper body tends to get stiff and a look a bit awkward performing solo jazz. During class, Kerry spoke about how getting things to feel and look natural is learned. That sounds contradictory at first, since natural implies something innate. But it is good to recognize that people who exude an aura of “natural dancer” have put a lot of hours practicing making the steps look easy.

Kerry began the class with a discussion of how the feet meet the floor. She used the analogy of elephant feet. Elephant feet, she explained, expand when they land on the ground. The toes spread out, and the elephant’s weight distributes across the entire foot. Kerry encouraged us to imagine our feet reacting to the floor in a similar way. She contrasted the foot fall of newish dancers, who often rely on a stompier version of stepping. Sometimes stomps are a good tool that add percussion. But landing the sole flat looses a connection to the ground. Letting the foot fall like an elephant’s allows weight to travel down the body and into the ground. This produces a reciprocal force moving upwards. The music will then pulse through the big muscles in the legs. This encourages a posture that connects a dancer with the form’s African lineage, which practiced a constant engagement of body and ground.

Kerry’s elephant foot metaphor reminded me of Nicolle Woods’ directive to make every step of a Lindy Hop dance push through the floor. There is part of that directive which is self-evident. A step by definition pushes through the ground. But there is a way of planting one’s foot where the full weight of the body transfers to the opposite leg. Dropping the full weight into the floor through the foot, and using the rebound to initiate the next movement, creates the type of groundedness that is at the heart of Lindy Hop.

The class practiced moving through the studio space with attention to the feet. We imagined the floor was mud; each step sunk in, and lifting the foot required resistance to the mud sucking our legs downwards. We then focused on leading our movement with different body parts: the head, the chest, the hips. This helped us practice expressing the music throughout our entire body, while keeping the rhythmic motor going in our legs. We brought attention to the pulse moving through our hamstrings.

As mentioned above, I came into the class wanting to work on loosening my upper body. When I learn choreographed routines, my upper body gets a bit locked. In Mix and Match competitions, when my adrenaline gets going, I get stiff and tense. The exercise of leading with different parts of the body helped loosen me up. There were two main reasons for that. Firstly, it literally stretched me out. It forced me to move my hips past where I normally moved them. It forced me to shake out my shoulders and feet. Secondly, it broke down some inhibitions. Kerry mentioned how dance can be a deeply vulnerable thing. It puts one’s body on display. People watch and judge its movement. Regular movement in life (i.e. movement that is not dance) is highly regulated by perceived social standards. Thrusting out a hip in public can be frightening. The body part movement exercise helped normalize expressive movements. This translated to feeling more loose and relaxed. I’m hopeful that practicing these exercises will train my body to reach that relaxed state more quickly, both while dancing solo and in partnership.