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Summary: Learn how to do the skater turn for modern dance in this free video dance lesson.
Views: 5,498 | Tags: diy, online, stretches, dancing, dance, instructors, dancesteps, moderndance
About the Expert
Connie Hale Connie Hale is the Studio manager and dance instructor at Cynergy Dance Studios in San Antonio, TX. Connie has been a featured dancer and performer at Walt Di... read more
Hi there! My name is Connie Hale and thanks for joining me here at expertvillage.com. Today we are learning some lyrical or modern dancing. What I am going to teach you now what I like to call is a skater turn. You see these used when figure skaters take turns onto the ice. Sometimes you will see them grab their foot and they connect to their head and they spin around really fast. We don't necessarily need ice to do that. I am going to teach you how to do it without the ice. We are going to start foot pointing to the floor. What I want you to picture here is your head, dipping down and whipping around that is going to get you around in a circle. It's a big whip with a body. We whip, and that is going to get us around in a circle. Okay, so just get this first body movement down. We whip into it so we lean down almost as if your shoulders are going to scoop down and up around your body, whip down. Right now notice my leg coming up in the back. It is coming up and what we call an attitude. Attitude is simply lifted. Like it's bent, I could turn it up a little bit. You can see my leg is bent. That is an attitude. That is how the leg is going to join us up into the back. So we drip down,just bring our leg up this time a little bit. Dip down and lift. Let's try that again. Dip down, lift and I am leading with my arms as if I am taking a Frisbee and throwing it down onto the ground all right. I'm going to take you a little further. I'm going to try to get around turn with that turn. I'm going to be leading with a shoulder, arm; we are dipping down. Your legs are going to come up and push us off the floor. Here with go into a skater turn. Down, we went into it and up. Again, let's try that again. Lean down, leaning in with our shoulder and arm. We bring it down and up. When you are in the actual pose I want you to make sure that your leg is staying parallel to the ground almost as if it were laying flat on the table. If you could picture my leg doing that and the body, the body is going to be parallel with the body. I am going to actually lean against the wall so you can see the positioning of my leg and my feet. It's all flat because I have been laying on a table and that is the position you are in when you are spinning. All right, let's do that one more time. Skater turn. We are here, sitting shoulder and arm down and up. All right, keep on dancing guys.