Using Weight Shifts to Teach New Dance Styles
July 17, 2024

When dance students specialize in a specific style, they often become accustomed to moving in specific ways. However, in today’s ever-diversifying dance landscape, dancers should expect to be asked to move with variety, often blending styles or switching between multiple genres over the course of a single work. 

Learning to shift weight is key to becoming a versatile dancer, so by getting your students comfortable with different kinds of weight shifts, you’ll be setting them up for a successful, wide-ranging career. 

Start With Strength and Somatics

When first approaching new weight shifts or styles in class, it’s important to help students develop the proper strength. Marcea Daiter, who teaches Dunham technique at Ailey Extension and also has a background in forms including ballet, modern, and Afro-Caribbean, says that a strong core is vital. She recommends a series of Pilates-inspired exercises that teachers can easily incorporate into a warm-up. [See technique video below.]

Marcea Daiter teaching Dunham technique at Ailey Extension. Photo by Nicole Tintle, courtesy AAADT.

Amy O’Neal, a lecturer at the University of Southern California’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, adds that it’s important to strengthen both the parallel and the external rotators, especially if a dancer might favor one foot position over the other. “Really train your parallel strength as equally as you do your external rotation strength, so that your hips are really strong and you are able to adapt,” she says. 

Somatics can also be a helpful tool for dancers learning to shift their weight. Daiter emphasizes the role that a good understanding of alignment can play in this process. “One of the things that helped me with my body weight was the shifting of the head and visualizing where my eyes are when I move,” she explains, recommending that teachers study and incorporate the principles of Joseph Pilates and the Zena Rommett Floor Barre techniques into their classes. 

You can also encourage your students to tune in to the placement of their bodies in space in other ways. Miriam Gittens, a freelance artist for Twyla Tharp and chuthis., and a former dancer with Ballet BC and Gibney Dance Company, recommends starting class with a standing body scan, which can help with developing proprioception. Establishing a keen sense of the body’s position can be helpful when navigating new genres and weight shifts.

Mix It Up

Learning a new style of dance and mastering the new weight shifts that come with it can feel unusual—and possibly confusing—to dance students. But by incorporating new movement patterns into classes on a regular basis, you can ease this transition and alleviate some of these growing pains.

Gittens says that studying opposition was key when she was a dance student learning new styles. She recalls a center tendu exercise given by Charla Genn, a member of the ballet faculty at Juilliard. “We always had to find a line of opposition with our pointer finger, opposing the other side’s toe,” she explains, adding that this exercise helped her find a new relationship to gravity.

Miriam Gittens. Photo by Andrea Mohin, courtesy Gittens.

O’Neal adds that incorporating some basic modern-dance principles, like fall and recovery, can be helpful, especially for dancers who are used to moving mostly along their plumb line. To get dancers even more off-balance, she says, she often incorporates exercises where a specific body part, like the head or pelvis, leads the rest of the body across the space. “Being able to be off-balance and catch yourself in a variety of different ways is important,” she says. 

For dancers who aren’t accustomed to floorwork, incorporating movements involving the floor and/or a quadruped position can help them learn about new ways to hold and move their bodies. O’Neal recommends incorporating some simple, accessible positions into class or warm-up, like lunges, squats, push-ups, and crawling. 

Honor Individuality

When teaching a skill that can feel new or different, it’s also very important to recognize each dancer’s individual strengths and how they relate to their body. “There’s a psychology to it, of coming into this new thing. There’s an insecurity or hesitancy,” O’Neal says, speaking specifically of many students who enter her beginning hip-hop class for the first time. “There’s this idea that they have to look cool. There’s this idea that they have to be something they’re not in order to do the movement.”

To combat this mindset, O’Neal includes information about the historical context of the dance form, emphasizing the importance of bringing one’s own identity into hip hop specifically. “I see a huge shift when people receive that information and are looking at it from ‘Oh, I might be a guest in this’ or ‘Oh, I get to show up as myself in this.’ ”

Amy O' Neal (center). Photo by Tony Udom, courtesy O' Neal.

Similarly, Daiter remembers how Nancy Bielski, who taught ballet when Daiter was a trainee with The Harkness Ballet, emphasized working with and honoring each dancer’s own anatomy. Recognize that all of your students have differing physicalities, and utilize an approach that allows them to work with their bodies instead of against them.

Gittens adds that, as with anything new, it’s important to start from a place of encouragement. Because dancers can often be goal- and results-oriented, try reframing a failure as a positive opportunity to learn.

“With anything new, it can be daunting,” Gittens says. “Encourage students to approach things openly, and encourage them to approach them not to succeed but to fail. I think it’s important to fail, because the more we fail, the more we learn.”

To watch a technique tutorial video of Daiter teaching Dunham technique, click here.

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