NiaDivas

Central Focus: To move energy along vertical and horizontal lines, with the intention of establishing grounding, power, balance, and ease. Learn how to direct energy up and down the spine using a vertical line as a visual. Once this flow is established, any movement can be expressed from center, out into horizontal lines.

Movement Form Energies: Duncan dance, Modern dance, Aikido

Music: Moodfood by Moodswings
Throw Off the Shackles
Moodswings Overture
Problem Solved
Rainsong
100% Total Success
Microcosmic
Spritual High (I)
Spiritual High (II)
Spiritual High (III)
Thailand
Piano Man

Moodfood Lyrics

Rainsong

Caught in a rainstorm
wondering what I must do
I'm standing alone
so many miles from you
I was thinking about our life together
knowing it must be now or never
to get back to you
now I've just got to get out of this rain
I can feel it washing my life away
and I know that I need to
get out of this rain
and listen to my heart again

I can feel it sweeping my life away
and I know that I need to get out of this rain
and listen to my heart again.

Spiritual High (II)

A very courageous woman asked me how much longer we were sticking to our current Earthsong routine. After telling her, "for a while longer", she honestly replied she was getting bored with it. And my reaction (in my head) was...you think YOU are bored with it, try teaching it every class of the week. What, a Nia teacher admitting, yup, I was getting bored. Now, I Love Nia...and I love teaching, so I knew there is more to this single element of wistfully feeling "bored". For me, this boredom meant I was stuck in my movement patterns and habits, had stopped really listening to the music with my body, and was lacking creative energy. Having just finished our first Welcome to Nia Class, where Lesley and I discussed how to energize movements, I turned to the 9 Movement Forms to break me out of my movement stigma and reenegize my body's conditioning. Any whew...what a discovery!

In Thursday's evening class, we still used Earthsong. The focus was on Energizing with the 3 Dance Arts: modern dance, duncan dance and jazz dance. WOW! What an entirely different experience allowing ourselves the experience and energy of these unique dance forms. Energizing our moves with modern dance we explored loading our legs with gravity, creating shapes in space and encouraging ourselves to be languid and emotive while connected to our base (legs). While energizing with Duncan dance, I found the upward magnetic energy in fully expanding the area around my heart and muscles in my chest. Allowing my movement to express a more carefree, child-like expression. With the energy of jazz, I found encouraging students to "be more out there" to "look and love it!". Nia movements laced with jazz have a snappy, confident-feel,--expressive and peppy!

In today's Nia, we did the routine, Moodfood.  With the focus on the feet, and all those sensuous sultry lyrics, WOW!  We started with rolling our feet back and forth and "rocking around the clock", we drew our attention to sensing our feet and letting the sensation travel up through our bodies and 13 main joints.  This routine brings us several Nia moves, cross-behind, cross-front, cha-cha-cha, kicks, stances, blocks energized with Tae Kwon Do, Aikido-like harmonizing spirals, soul-based Duncan dance, and shape-based modern dance. 

Along the way, the lyrics to two of the songs vied for our attention!  Rainsong and Spiritual High.  Click Lyrics If you'd like to see the lyrics.   Click Moodfood by the MoodSwings to see more about the music CD. 

More about the moves used during the routine can be found in The Nia Technique book, available for purchase before or after NiaDivas classes at Youngstown Arts Center.EnJoy!  Lesley

asin: B000QCQ89E binding: DVD list price: $14.95 USD amazon price: $14.95 USD

Reincarnation is a poetic documentary on one of the greatest American artists Isadora Duncan living through her followers at the present time.

Mysteriously, after over the century passed from the time she lived, Isadora imposes her art and philosophy on contemporary artists who are compelled to keep doing her movement and preserve her choreography, though it seems to be quite outdated.

One of the offspring of Isadora, one of her reincarnations is the founder and artistic director of "Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation" Lori Belilove. Through Lori's life and work, through the art of her students and company members, through the lines of a theatrical play conceived by Lori, the image and entire persona of Isadora Duncan comes alive.

This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.

author: Isadora Duncan asin: 0871401584 binding: Paperback list price: $14.95 USD amazon price: $10.17 USD

Fabulous is the only adjective that comes close to doing justice to Isadora Duncan (1878-1927). Her awesomely self-assured autobiography depicts a woman who while still in her teens tells an eminent theatrical manager (from whom she desperately needs a job), "I have discovered the art that has been lost for two thousand years.... I bring you the dance." In Duncan's rendering of her life, composers fling themselves at the piano and compose new music for her on the spot. Men pine for her love (the book's sexual frankness, while hardly startling today, was considered quite scandalous in 1927). And the poor mortals who can never understand her need to be free can at least applaud wildly at her concerts. Duncan and her siblings sleep in a bare Parisian attic, then dance barefoot through the Luxembourg Gardens. They travel to Greece to worship "in the Sacred Land of Hellas," where they build their very own temple. Duncan is capable of seeing the humor in her rhapsodic immersion in art, but we don't really want her to be realistic and self-deprecating like ordinary mortals. It's her divine passion, her supreme confidence in her own genius that make My Life such fun to read. --Wendy Smith