Beginning Shoulder Shimmy
Let's do shoulder shimmies...
Ok, a little disclaimer first... I am going to talk about this as a beginning Western student approaches the step, someone with no knowledge of eastern movement, so if you are an advanced dancer or a pro, try to think back to how you learned this step... you probably have already changed many things about the way you do this and may have resolved it to real Mid-Eastern movement already. But this is a good movement for illustrating the difference in approach and how to get from Western to Mid-Eastern.
First, let's take Western movement... the way most of us begin doing shoulder shimmies...
Mostly we do shoulder shimmies by moving one shoulder forward then the other and alternating between them. Or, more specifically, we move one forward and the other back at the same time, alternating the positions at a high rate of speed, trying to keep the movement even and synchronized, so that each shoulder moves the same distance and speed and the movement stays coordinated. The intention is to make the fringe on our bras move.
Here's a couple of diagrams to illustrate what I mean. This is sort of a bird's eye view of a dancer... she's a little geometric but imagine you are looking down on the top of her head and she's facing the top of your screen. The oval is the dancer's chest. The colored figure is the dancer's shoulder line, connecting from shoulder to sternum to shoulder to spine. The black circle in the center is the center of the dancer's chest - the pivot point for this movement.
Here she is, ready to try a shoulder shimmy for the first time:
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Sternum
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Left Shoulder
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Right Shoulder |
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Spine
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First she moves her right shoulder forward...
Then she moves her Left shoulder forward...
Resulting in a very Western style shoulder shimmy with a lot of shoulder activity but not much fringe movement...
Here's the movement full speed...
Ok, your turn to try the same thing...
Pop quiz... what part of your body are you thinking about moving when you do this?
Wait...
Don't read ahead until you have your answer...
Got it? Ok, read on...
The usual answers, in order of popularity:
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1)
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My shoulders (it's a shoulder shimmy after all...) |
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2)
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The fringe on my bra (because that's what I'm trying to move) |
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3)
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My chest and back muscles (because that's what makes the shoulders move) |
A side note on focus and awareness...
Your brain is designed to be AWARE of a great many things at once, but can only FOCUS on one at a time. So if you are FOCUSED on moving your right shoulder forward, you are NOT focused on moving your left shoulder back (even though you may be aware of moving it.) That is largely why, especially in the early stages of learning shimmies, they sometimes get out of sync and stall...
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Hop to the Top
URL: http://www.ZillTech.com
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Designed and built by Aziza Sa'id herself, with assistance from her engineering alter ego Megan Marti'n.
Last Revised: 3/25/01
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