Modern Dance Warm-Ups: Head & Tail Connection

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Chell Garcia-Trias and I'm a modern dance instructor in Austin, Texas. I'm going to show you how to do a head-tail connection while rolled up in a ball. So this is just a nice way to find good alignment and a good connection between your head and your tail bone especially the way we would do it in a released style of Modern Dance. So what I'm going to do is curl up in a ball where I'm kind of up on my toes. So I'm curled in a ball and up on my toes, I'm going to rest my hands in front of me so that my weight is equally distributed between my hands and my feet. And I'm just balancing here, I'm just resting. I'm going to tuck my head under and just relax it. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to imagine some energy shooting at the top of my head and it's going to pull, pull, pull me all the way on to my hands and then I'm going to feel some energy shooting out of my tail bone and it's going to pull, pull, pull me back to my feet. It's very subtle and it's important to do this just slowly to nice release for the back and a nice warm up also. So I'm dropping my head and I'm pushing through energy through the top of my head and then back to my tail bone. And then forward to my head and back through my tail bone. And you really want the motion to initiate with the top of your head and your tail bone rather than with your hands. It's really easy for you to just become about your arms and you don't want that to happen. The slower that you do it, the more you'll be able to find that connection. And you can do it so slowly that you're just barely moving. That's a great way to find the connection between your head and tail bone, the way that I would do in Modern Dance."