Travel Steps Study Guide 5: Using Footwork

Clean confident footwork skills allow grace and rhythm to flow with ease.  While some belly dance uses virtually no locomotor steps (for instance, isolation-intensive tribal fusion choreography, or flowing classic Egyptian moves in the style of Tahia Carioca), every dancer’s alignment begins at the point where her feet meet the floor.  Every entrance, exit, weight shift, and clean body line is, at its deepest foundation level, balanced over the feet.  Rooted in the stable base of sure footing, both the mind and body are ready to relax, focus, or spring into action. 

Coordinated with music, footwork underlies the movements that become dance.  A deep connection to the music is a hallmark of traditional styles of belly dance, and footwork is often used to interpret rhythm, with steps in time with the beat.  Precision footwork, perfectly timed with the music, may create virtuoso performances.  Or it may create something tedious and robotic, stripped of life, breath, and joy. 

The Travel Steps program is based on the idea of reducing dance to units of “step,” and “hold,” effectively digitizing dance into ones and zeros.  Digitization of dance, like the digitization of music or images, confers the wonderful ability to easily record and replicate data.  It’s an excellent tool for the classroom, and a boon to choreographers who archive their dances with written notation.  I strongly recommend dance training based in a “digital” approach, drilling and perfecting discrete components in their most pure form.  A “digital” approach to performance, however, has limited utility.  For theatrical or character work, it might be a great strategy to create mechanistic looking movement, but it’s unlikely to create the soft warmth that typifies traditional belly dance styles.

Dance is a window to the extraordinary.  You may relate to this idea best in these exact terms, or you may prefer to think of magic, mystery, spirituality, divinity, the unknowable, or a sense of reverence, wonder, or awe.  Some forms of dance dazzle with spectacular physical feats, like the special effects in a movie.  There’s room in belly dance to impress audiences with stunts and tricks (particularly in specialties like drum solo or balancing props), but more often we appeal to the emotions on a subtler level, like poetry or perfume.  As dancers, we know the long hours of training that our form requires, but audiences see our movements as “natural,” and the aesthetic of our dance is flowing and organic.  At our best, we reveal the natural as extraordinary, creating moments of transcendence in everyday reality.  (Or, in some cases, working in gothic or tribal fusion styles, we create the extraordinary through deliberately unnatural movements, working from the other side of the same coin of aesthetics.)  Whatever the style of belly dance, the secret to our power is not fancy footwork—it’s our connection to the rhythm of the universe.  Technical skills are simply a toolkit to help us communicate this connection to our audience.

Many strategies and philosophies exist to help seekers deepen their connection to the extraordinary, but for dancers a good place to start is with music.  Music originates from the organic rhythms of the body—breath and the beat of the heart—and the living musician who creates sound by moving her breath or body across an instrument.  Deepen your awareness of these rhythms.  While functions in the body can be described on a molecular level in terms of definite chemical interactions, our senses don’t perceive “on” or “off” in the flow of blood and breath.  The heart squeezes and relaxes; the lungs expand and deflate.   These cycles are contained by punctuated timing, but between beats and breaths, within the container of timing, blood and air continue to flow.  To interpret the extraordinary in music, mark the rhythm, but follow the flow. 

And, in whatever way you understand it, follow the extraordinary sense of being alive.  The “on” and “off” that we do perceive in our body is the “on” of life, and on a more quotidian level the “on” that marks the presence of our connection to our vitality—that feeling of flowing or of being “all there” or “in the zone.” 

Stay on.

→ Next in the Travel Steps Study Guide: Balance and Alignment 

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