How to dance on your hands

How to Infuse Intention and Artistry Into Your Hands

Despite being one of the most-used parts of the body in everyday life, the hands can often be an afterthought in dance. Your dexterous digits, so valuable for writing, driving, texting and general gesticulating, can become limp and lifeless without some mindfulness. Though the role of the hands, wrists and fingers varies depending on your dance form, the necessary intentionality crosses all disciplines.

Think of your hands as part of a larger whole.

“Your fingers are what send the energy out from the body,” says bharatanatyam dancer, choreographer and teacher, and the co-artistic director of Ragamala Dance Company in Minneapolis, Aparna Ramaswamy. “The gestures do not stand alone.” TaraMarie Perri, whose background as a dancer and choreographer feeds her yoga teaching at the Perri Institute for Mind and Body and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, recommends focusing on the energy pathways throughout the whole body as oppositional and supportive forces. “Think of the palms as the distal ends of the arms,” she says.To practice this full-bodied integration, find connections between the fingers and other parts of your body. For example, Sandra Chinn, who teaches at Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Berkeley Ballet Theater, tells students to think of the fingers as “picking up” the toes as they initiate a développé.

Bear weight mindfully.

The transition to weight-bearing movements on your hands can be scary if you’re not used to it. Try shifting your perspective by thinking of your hands as feet. “Hands are designed for articulation, gesture and agility. Feet are designed for stability, grounding and balance. As dancers we get to play with it in both ways,” says Perri. “The challenge of going onto the hands is how to find the same thing that I find in my feet.”Additionally, protect your hands and wrists in weight-bearing activities by remaining strong in your core and distributing the weight throughout your body. “The alignment of hands, elbows and shoulders is the way you would think about the ankles, knees and hips,” says Perri.

Sophie Kuller, courtesy Perri

Throw flexibility out the window.

“You can’t think in terms of flexibility with the hands and wrists,” says Perri, noting that the wrist is not as mobile as the ankle. Wrist joints have a limited set of movements: flexion and extension (like dribbling a basketball) and adduction and abduction (like waving goodbye). Twisting of the wrist happens in the forearm via the radius and the ulna.With that in mind, don’t try to overstretch your fingers or wrists when they’re bearing weight. Perri also recommends being especially mindful of the mobility of the thumb. “If we overly mobilize our thumb we can cause deterioration in the ability of our wrists,” she says. “If we think of the spaces between the fingers as pizza slices when they are flat on the floor supporting weight, we want to keep the slices between the thumb and pointer finger the same as the others. ”

Rotate the wrists on an axis.

To maintain a clean, elongated line during port de bras as you move from one position to another, Chinn recommends thinking of the middle finger as the central axis and rotating the hand around it. “In the classical ballet positions, you have to imagine the hands start much higher on the forearms,” she says. “If you don’t take the time to do that, you are going to get a lot of breaking in the wrist. The rotation starts higher.”

Sandra Chinn

Nick Korkos, courtesy Chinn

Take care of your hands.

With the increase in texting and computer use in our everyday lives comes the accompanying side effects of those repetitive motions, especially in the thumb joint. As you go about your day, try to bring some awareness to the alignment of your wrists. For most prolonged acti­vities, like typing, your hands should extend in one long line out from your elbows. Avoid breaking at the wrists. As you integrate any new type of hand or wrist movement into your life, be patient with the process, especially if it’s related to weight bearing. “Hands and wrists take time to get used to weight bearing,” says Perri. “There are exercises you can do to help alleviate the fatigue.”

Communicate clearly.

The many hand gestures in bharatanatyam have different meanings depending on their placement in relation to the rest of the body. A muddled gesture could completely distort the effect of the movement. But even if you’re not performing a genre that denotes specific hand meanings, your hands can speak volumes.Becoming more specific in your hand movements is often just a matter of repetition over time. Ramaswamy suggests staying diligent about the shape of the hands and their position in relation to the rest of your body. Practice more times than you think you’ll need until it’s second-nature, and use emotion to fully bring your hand gestures to life.

Teachers: For tips on refining your students’ hands, wrists and fingers, visit dance-teacher. com.

Hand dances| Numeridanse tv

Musiques de tables – Thierry De Mey

For this creation, performed by 3 percussionists and their 6 hands playing on a table, Thierry de Mey highlights an ambience of various figures that give rise to a variety of sounds with the different ways the hands strike the table: flat-hand, backhand, hand-chop, fist-hit, finger-flick, hand-edge, fingertips, stone.

What is surprising is the contrast between the performers’ stoicism and the variation of their hands, which are incredibly precise. Here, hands become real instruments and create a dance of sounds and gestures.

Light music – Thierry De Mey

With Light music, Thierry de Mey centres stages an orchestra conductor without an orchestra, a percussionist without percussion... a percussionist who “triggers sounds and musical sequences manipulates them in time and space, loops them, rips them apart, makes them resonate”.

Folk you - Collectif Up & Over it

Suzanne Cleary and Peter Harding present themselves as “hand dancers”. Mind-blowing Irish dance performers, they decided to use their hands to symbolize this dance where, traditionally, only legs and feet are required.

They intend to move Irish dance away from the all-predictable, highly-formatted pigeon-hole of major galas and international championships and rediscover the pleasure, the mischievousness and quintessence of the original rhythm. This traditional dance, which migrated to the United States in the suitcases of thousands of Irish women and men, played a great role in music-hall and musical comedy dances which developed throughout the 20th century, in particular tap dancing.

« The Roll dance » extract from Gold Rush – Charlie Chaplin

No-one can resist this dance that Charlie performs on the edge of a restaurant table with two forks and two rolls of bread. He becomes a puppet-master and a dancer at the same time, he plays on the contrast between his hands and his facial expressions. The moment the dance and the music kick off, the rolls of bread become ‘real’ characters and we, as spectators, are immediately filled with empathy. Charlie dares to play like a child and finds himself believing in his little bread roll-dancers; he takes us on a journey into his personal fantasy, into his imaginary world.

Agwa – Mourad Merzouki

The strength of the last scene of this choreography lies in the sensitivity, gentleness and attention that these hip-hop dancers, who are generally on their feet working on speed and virtuosity, carry in their hands. The hands, in synergy with the water that this work takes its inspiration from, connect us with the poetry and fragility of the performers.

Le P’tit bal – Philippe Decouflé

Philippe Decouflé has always been interested in signs, movements and sketches, which can instantaneously, upon simple observation, conjure up a memory or provoke an emotion.

Backed by a song by Bourvil, Philippe Decouflé and Pascale Houbin use their hands to make signs and accessories dance. Instead of offering us play on words, they propose hand-play, visual and gestural winks.

Kiss & cry – Michèle Anne De Mey

An entire show performed by hands, accompanied by a ballet of technicians, cameras and accessories.

This was the challenge that the filmmakert Jaco Van Dormael, and the choreographer Michèle Anne de Mey, ltook on... they refer to it as “nanodances”. Like two children, they create and film on sight a miniature world, where the stories, which are projected directly unto a big screen, are narrated by the dancers’ hands and fingers. The hands love, dance, travel, curl up together, climb, roam around different worlds.

Namasya – Shantala Shivalingappa

In the different traditional Indian dances, hands play a highly codified, frequently narrative role that is rooted in a sacred, ancestral art. In the Odissi, one of these dances, there are 67 different hand positions. Decorated in detail, they deliver the melody, just like feet deliver the rhythm.

Shantala Shivalingappa, a kuchipundi dancer, transposes her knowledge of traditional dance to contemporary dance.

Dans Namasya, she proposes 4 solos, choreographed in collaboration with Ushio Amagatsu, Pina Bausch and her own mother Savitry Nair. In each solo, she becomes aware of the vital role of the hands and, as such, places emphasis on them as dance incentives. Determined, strong, serious, light, subtle and gracious, her hands lead the way and prompt the rest of her body to follow suit.

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