Ernestine Under Quarantine: Fusion Pointe Experiment!

Hi friends!

Last week, I noticed that while I was up on my pointes improvising, my body kept adding in things I learned in Middle Eastern dance classes. So this week, I did an experiment: Could I do some standard "belly dance" (a lot of us don't like that term for a lot of reasons; read below) vocabulary on flat and the en pointe?

Well, I gave it the old college try.

I think innovation of all kinds is happening all around us, as the traditional stimuli of our daily lives decreases and slows. For me, it's incredibly fascinating to see if the very difficult neuro-muscular territory of Middle Eastern dance is possible while maintaining the muscle tension needed to stay en pointe. Watch me negotiate this with my body.

Important to note: Middle Eastern dance is all about isolations. In this video, I'm primarily working with hip isolations. I say that this type of dance is WAY harder than ballet because it's all about teaching your nervous system to communicate with literally only one muscle at a time and to only activate that one muscle or small muscle group in order to achieve the isolation, while keeping everything else--your shoulders, your knees down--absolutely still. So it's really, really hard, and I am by no means a good example of a seasoned professional in this idiom.

Now, imagine, adding to that, pointe: You have to zip up your core, put on your "corset" (or engage the transversus abdominus, that big corset-shaped abdominal muscle), and keep your core absolutely locked down so that the rest of your limbs can move, supported by this core engagement, without knocking you over. So you can imagine the challenge of "locking down" the transversus abdominus and then layering an iliacus isolation. Whoa, nelly.

So you know what you're watching:

-I start by warming up my feet a bit, which involves the typical plié-relevé sequence, first in 1st position, then échappés (from 5th to 1st position). 

-After that, I try a type of isolation known by my teachers as "tic toc," both en pointe and on flat. On pointe, I show it to you from the front, side, and back.

-The next thing is mayas, which is a pelvic isolation in which you move your hips in a figure-eight formation. This proved SUPER hard on pointe.

-I attempt some hip slides, where you move your hips from side to side as if "your pelvis is on a skateboard." (I love this image.) That was super impossible on pointe. Right now! I'll keep trying!

-After that comes undulations, which is a very specific body roll, initiated by the chest, "up to down." I try it on flat, then en pointe, while bouréeing, because there's no way I can stay on relevé otherwise!

Enjoy!

Fondly,

Ernestine

P.s.

It's easy to confuse Middle Eastern dance movements with "sexy" dancing--especially because I often combine them with things my body found in hip hop or other contemporary forms that use hip movement (which also have their origins in Middle Eastern, African, or other international forms). If you find it sexy, enjoy; however, my code of dance ethics makes it important for me to explain exactly what these movements are within the very specific Middle Eastern dance vocabulary, and why I've spent years trying to perfect them, with very imperfect results. "Belly dance" often gets relegated to the category of "not really serious dance" forms; on the contrary: It's one of the hardest things I've ever studied!