Hand Movements in Flamenco Dancing: Free Advanced Latin Dance Lessons

"Hi! Thank you for visiting Expertvillage.com. My name is Yvette Parrish. What we will be doing is starting and learning a little bit about flamenco hands and learning a little bit about how to make them a little bit more flexible and some exercises you can do. If you are going to be dancing flamenco and using the castanets and doing handwork I would recommend not having terribly long nails because that will affect how you do the castanets, it will affect your handwork. So that’s something to consider. Having long dragon like nails. trying to dance flamenco doesn’t really go. Flamenco exercise that you can do at home to get your hands a little bit more flexible, is you start off with your hands, your palms towards each other like this. You don’t go really far, just kind of keep them right here at about tummy level. Start with your middle finger and you curl them in it is called floreo and you bring them out. You start with your middle finger, open it, middle finger and out, out, and out and what happens is they work together. Just like we were holding the castanets. I said you can kind of hold them one above another or side to side. Same thing when you are doing your handwork. You start off palms facing each other, always lead with the middle finger, lead with the middle finger out and out, middle finger, out, out, middle finger and what this does is will help the flexibility of your hands. You will be able to get fancy once you have a little bit more flexibility to your fingers."