Stretches for Jazz Dancing

Series Summary

Jazz dancing has evolved from two different eras in American history. The earliest forms of the dance came from an African American dance between 1800 and 1900. Since then broadway choreographers have taken it to new places. In the 50's when jazz was the main style of both dance and music tap dance was the style of dance most popular. As the era progressed new dances began to take form such as the Cakewalk, Charleston and Lindy Hop. Tap dance became more of it's own style in itself as modern jazz dancing began to evolve. It is considered a very difficult dance to attain mastery but with work, persistence and these videos you will be that much closer.

In this free video series you will not only learn many of the basics for jazz dancing but how to put them all together. Our expert covers everything from the type of shoes that are best for training to how to isolate your head when performing a move. These hands on videos will walk you step by step through the fundamentals and show you how anyone can be a dancer, even you!!

Video Transcript

"First we're going to start with our head and neck isolations. Its very important to warm up your head and neck because you can strain your muscles. First thing you want to make sure is that our shoulders are in alignment with our head and our neck okay? Making sure our shoulders are straight not back okay straight, straight ahead to the side. Then we're going to start with our head and we're going to take it down into the chest releasing and then we're going to come back, back to your center always making sure you come back to your center stretching back. Not stretching your back but your neck and coming back to center. And we're going to take it down one, two and center, three and four, stretch it back, five, six, seven and eight. Then we're going to stretch it to the right to a tilt really slow, warming up the side of the neck and coming back to center, three and four. Stretching to the left again stretching it slow and long coming back to center, three and four. One more time and one, two and three, four, side five, six, center seven hold eight."