Holiday drills: unlock that shimmy!

As well as bellydance, I teach Pilates and Yoga. I’ve been noticing recently that in those modalities, we often focus on moving our legs without moving our pelves. It’s as if the hip joint is a point of division and isolation, which often it is. However in bellydance, I feel that the point of division and isolation is higher up, at the waist. When I talk about the waist, I’m referring to the dividing line between ribcage and pelvis.

Wherever I teach about posture, I aim for a lengthening of the space between these two bony masses, to counteract the common pattern of thrusting the front of the ribcage forward and up and/or tipping the front of the pelvis forward and down, both of which create compression in the mid back. For bellydance, and for our hip-focussed movements in particular, we want to shift our stability to the ribcage so that the lower body can dangle loosely from it and be freely expressive. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that the pelvis moves with the legs in bellydance, whereas it doesn’t necessarily in everyday life. And for the pelvis to move freely, we need to have soft (i.e. not locked) knees. If your knees are locked straight, your pelvis/hip area locks up and can’t move fluidly. To me, the degree of softness in the knee joint is a major difference between good bellydance posture and good everyday posture.

It’s really easy to overanalyse shimmies, which is fair enough, because there’s a LOT of different ones, and a lot of different ways to generate them.

In ATS® we use the term “shimmy” as shorthand for a walking ¾ shimmy “on the up”. This means that the weighted hip (the one attached to the leg our weight is on) moves up on the downbeat (the count of the music), up on the upbeat (the “and” between the counts), and down in between.

ATS® mostly uses the specific technique of pushing into the ground to generate the upwards movement of the hip. As we push off the floor, we allow energy to travel up our leg and into our hip. Most movements in ATS® are soft, so we get a reverb effect rather than an upwards lock of the hip.

Heaps has been written and said about the mechanics and philosophy of the shimmy (this blog post is excellent). This holiday drill is designed to loosen up the lower body with an alternating shimmy. It’s different from the ¾ we use in ATS® in that we are alternating every upward hip movement (and hence the weighted/pushing leg) from one side to the other.

I’m using some non-bellydance music here, a piece I would never perform to but with a steady beat and a synth line that makes me want to shimmy! I start with a big weight transfer, picking up the opposite foot, then transfer my weight with both feet still on the ground. I vary the speed of the shimmy and add optional arm and level variations.

Have fun, and post your favourite song to shimmy to in the comments!