Get Your Downward Dog on With TaraMarie Perri to Celebrate International Yoga Day
June 19, 2017

Guess what, dance teachers. Today is the third annual International Yoga Day. In honor of the event, a special free yoga and meditation session will be held at Castle Clinton in Battery Park, NYC, 5–8:30 pm. To register, click here. The first 500 participants get a free yoga mat!

For those of you not in the greater NYC area, take a look at how NYU professor TaraMarie Perri teaches yoga for dancers.


In a small studio four floors above Manhattan’s rush-hour commute, 20 or so students sit on their heels at the center of their yoga mats. “We’re going to do a hips class today,” says TaraMarie Perri, adjunct professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. The dancers look nervous to approach deep stretching and strengthening at 9 am, but Perri assures them that this is about much more than that. “Do you have a sense of how your hips actually function? You’re thinking joint rotation, but I want you to look at the whole pelvis,” she says. As the class later works through a series of lunging poses, she continues. “Turnout isn’t about how far you can push your hip to the floor. Lifting up through the top of your head and imagining the hips narrowing can actually make room in the joint—something you can think of as you stand at the barre, too.”

What’s immediately clear is that Perri doesn’t teach your average yoga class. Sure, the poses and sequencing aren’t wildly different from Vinyasa flow, but her curriculum was built with dancers in mind. In 90 minutes, she has addressed breathing to make movement easier, finding strength in hypermobility and relieving post-performance stress. “We don’t teach bliss and rainbows,” says Perri, whose Mind Body Dancer method has taken over New York studios Steps on Broadway, Mark Morris Dance Center and Dance New Amsterdam, as well as other programs here and abroad. “It’s about learning that ‘When I’m really angry, I grip my hips, but when I breathe through it, the tension goes away.'”

Photo by Matthew Murphy

Perri took her first yoga class while earning her dance MFA at Tisch. “Yoga really piqued my intellectual interests. After just one or two classes, I noticed it had completely changed the way I was taking dance. I had a deep sense of alignment and anatomical awareness,” she says. That fueled her to get certified and transition into teaching yoga full-time, eventually returning to her alma matter as an adjunct professor.

But it wasn’t until a few years later when Perri realized she might be able to better bridge the professional worlds of yoga and dance. “A former student was leaving to teach at the Boston Ballet School and wanted advice, and while we were talking, she suggested I make my own curriculum,” she says. Perri began to explore what was most important to her as a dancer and yogi—alignment, breath, meditation—and started to outline Mind Body Dancer.

Photo by Matthew Murphy

MBD is designed to address dancers’ strengths and weaknesses both physically and mentally: Dancers often approach yoga with none other than the “work harder” dancer mindset, pushing their flexibility and muscling through poses. “Regular yoga is too fast and sometimes heated,” says Perri. “That doesn’t complement a dancer’s training, because it’s what they do all day in the studio.” The method encourages prop use; adding a blanket under the sitting bone in half-pigeon pose or putting hands on a yoga block can completely change a stretch.

The biggest takeaway is how dancers—part artists, part athletes—can discover the best way to work through a relentless routine of class, rehearsals and performances. “Dancers learn to imitate and just find the muscle memory of a step, but they’re rarely making choices,” she says. “Am I ready to take that leg high or should I keep it low today? Yoga is about learning the differences between discomfort, challenge and injury. It’s awakening patience and learning to let go. And it’s about being present. And that awareness is what makes a dancer an artist.”

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