How to Feel a Weight Shift Instead of Just Copying the Step

From a standing, neutral position, shift your weight from one foot to the other. Keep doing this until you know exactly what it feels like when your other foot is able to come up freely, without making you fall down.

Now, the next time you are practicing some steps, check whether or not your free foot really is free. If it isn’t, where did the weight you thought was arriving fail to arrive? If you can stop and take your free foot off the floor, then it has arrived and you are balanced. If you can’t stop, then you’re on your way to getting there, but you may be rushing or not getting all the way. If you can, then you’re good! You can take that foot and go on stepping.

Try it in pivots, turns, and other more complex movements, and check the feeling of balance at the other foot. You may find that sometimes your upper body hasn’t quite finished traveling with the pivot, or turn, but your feet are already on to the next thing. This can be a feeling of rushing. Your upper body isn’t quite balanced when your feet begin their next action, and as a result, it ends up lagging behind your feet.

It can be difficult to coordinate the timing and speed of your feet with your upper body if they aren’t balanced at the end of a movement. Your balance might be wobbly. You might have other compensations to balance yourself, like keeping your knees stiff or your shoulders, neck, and arm muscles tense. This can make the movement feel harder than it needs to feel if you are balanced at the foot. Try again!

If it’s still difficult to figure it out, try taking things slow and taking the arms out of the equation. Just do the feet, and see if you can feel where the weight is going. You might also try counting between counts, or checking yourself in a mirror or on your phone to see if you’re leaning too far, keeping your knees stiff, or lifting your foot too early. All these things can keep your weight from arriving where it needs to. The good news is that once you feel the balance and ease in your feet, the rest of your body will usually follow. The more balanced you are at your base, the easier and more graceful it will feel to move.

In contemporary dance, in particular, it’s important to understand the path your weight takes through a dance move, as well as all the shapes your body makes through the movement. This might sound redundant, but the movement might look correct, but feel unstable and off-balance if it’s not actually feeling like the movement has really arrived.

You might look like you’re doing it, but inside it isn’t quite right. We want to really know what our weight and energy feels like in a dance movement, and not just copy the shapes. The shapes might be right, but there is another element of a dance move: the energy and weight. Your weight might get you half-way there, and that half is an important part of the move. It might just be that it needs to get the rest of the way!

Choreography isn’t just a map of poses, it’s a map of the spaces your body travels through. When you begin to understand and feel where and how your weight moves through a dance move, your transitions will be much smoother and your timing will be improved.