In Nia we do something that is called cooking all four sides. When I first learned this I thought it to be just when we were on the ground. “Cooking” to me was the “side” of the body that was on the ground. When you “cook” all four sides you allow your belly, your back, your left side, and your side to “cook” on the ground. So basically you are lying on a different “side” at one point in the dance. In one routine, I can’t remember which one, while we are standing we turn and face one wall, then turn again, then turn again, then turn again and Debbie called it cooking all four sides. I thought, “Wow! I hadn’t thought to call THAT cooking all four sides, because (as I mentioned) I think of ‘cooking’ as being on the floor.” But it works. We are “cooking” or facing all sides, all walls. In country line dancing we call it a four-wall dance. Often times there are a few steps then a turn, a few steps, then a turn, and so on, eventually you face all four walls. There are two wall dances and maybe even three, but the point is you face a different direction. Generally the back becomes the front and the front becomes the back.
I’ve posted about Nia Routines before. I explained a bit about how the routines are created and teachers can purchase them. Nia routines used to be choreographed and performed on the training DVD by Debbie Rosas or Carlos Rosas or both. I’ve also posted about the fact that Nia morphs and changes. At the end of 2010 Carlos AyaRosas, the male co-creator of Nia retired. As with any company that wants to continue on after a founder retires Nia had to make some changes. To me it seems as if Nia had been thinking about this for a while. I know when I attended my Nia White Belt Intensive both Debbie and Carlos talked about Nia continuing on after they leave. So it seems to me that they had plans and ideas for how Nia will change. I think it is evident in the way that Nia does not seem to be a flag flapping in the wind, it has true direction. With the exit of Carlos a new era has been born. Debbie is now co-creating routines with Nia Black Belt Trainers. I love Nia and enjoy both the routines Debbie created and the ones Carlos created. There are some I like more than others. I am not saying that I like the new one I have seen more than I liked the “old” ones, I am just saying, “Yay! Nia is not disappointing me.” The new routine I have looked at is just as fabulous as the old routines I love.
As a little background: In order to teach Nia we must pay a licensing fee. When we pay the fee we are purchasing the right to teach, continued education, and four Nia routines. We are free to purchase additional routines when they are available, but four are included in the licensing fee and we are obligated to learn at least four a year. I just recently renewed my license and ordered my routines. I ordered two that are older (from 2007 and 2008) and two that are considered our new ones, dated 2011. Usually I skim through all four before deciding which one to learn next. One of them I ordered I have done once before in a class so I know that I like it and I was planning on learning that next, but my curiosity about one of the new ones got to me. I decided to learn it next after having watched it.
I am very excited about this routine because it has the “four-wall” or cooking all four sides technique in it. The routine I am currently teaching has it too but only briefly, this new routine has this technique in more than one song. Since a Nia class is not a dance lesson we just lead follow like other cardio workout classes the cooking all four sides is to not a series of complicated steps, but it does allow us to face other directions. In FreeDance there is always opportunities to face many directions and sometimes in the Nia movements alone one can be turning far enough to achieve facing another wall, but this is choreographed to have the entire class turn. It allows the class to see a different perspective. I think it is fabulous.
It could be making me nostalgic and thinking of country dancing days . . . but more so, I am excited to have this technique used in a Nia routine so my students can see things from the front if they are always in the back or the back, if they are always in the front. It will help move the class in new directions and Beyond!
Have you ever thought about the fact that a cardio dance class is pretty much like a line dance?
I have posted about Nia FreeDance before. Nia FreeDance is meant to encourage creativity. In Nia routines sometimes we have entire songs that are FreeDance. Not all routines have an entire FreeDance song, but all routines have at least one part as FreeDance. The one part could be that our feet have choreography and our arms and hands are free to move. The creativity is released. As the 4th Principle of the Nia White Belt it can also be used as a tool to help a Nia teacher learn a routine and/or explore his or her practice. The principle has 8 stages. The third stage of FreeDance is Feelings and Emotions with a catch phrase of: Pretend, Fake It, Act As If. This is the stage where you pick an emotion and you act it out. This is not the same as stage 4 where you draw on the real you and you act out a story you have experienced, this stage is pretend.
The idea of stage 3 of Nia FreeDance is to pick an emotion, a feeling and then act it out. Pretend you are feeling that emotion at that moment. This would be practice or play outside of a class setting where you are doing a routine. So when using this tool as a way to grow and create you aren’t even expected to dance. The exercise is to pick an emotion act it out for a bit, then pick another emotion. Acting and explaining the feeling with your body in an exaggerated way. If it helps create a story in order to fake that emotion. It can be somewhat fun because normally when you are angry you probably would not throw yourself down on the floor and kick and scream, but when we are pretending to be angry and acting “as if” you can. You can throw an angry punch. You can run and jump for joy. You can do anything you would like and since it probably wouldn’t be something you would be “allowed” to do in society it tends to spur creativity. And this creativity gets your body moving in news ways. It gets your heart pumping. It gets your blood moving. It gets your joints juicy.
I used this stage not too long ago as the focus of a few of my Nia Classes and it turned out to be very interesting. So within the class setting we actually danced our pretend feelings and emotions. We continued on with the routine we were doing at the time, but we added our “act as if”. So it altered our movements a bit. We allowed ourselves to follow the emotion so as we were dancing steps and hand movements might have been changed, but we still danced. As I said it was interesting because my class did not want to act the “negative emotions”. Some had a difficult time with some of the ones we deem as “negative” or ones that go against one’s normal self. We danced: keeping a secret, letting a secret go, happy, loopy, light, jealous, worry, love, angry, masculine, annoyed, bashful, brave, calm, childlike, guilty, fearless, and more. We tend to assign negative and positive, but they just are . . .I think that we can look at an emotion and or a feeling and it can be neither, but as we live with it it could become one or the other. If we let it affect us in a negative way, then maybe it can be perceived as a negative emotion?
The Embody and Share portion of the Nia White Belt Manual states: “Emotions are energetic responses to our experiences. We must learn to deal with our emotions to keep ourselves free and unblocked.” So my thought process is, that if an emotion “blocks” us or causes us stress then we consider it negative.
People didn’t like the emotions they felt were negative. There was a tendency to not pick them from the list I had displayed. But I think they are good for exploring movement. So it’s fun to play with them all. Remembering it is pretend, we are faking being (whatever the emotion is that we chose), we are pretending.
Well, what do you think? I invite you to make a list of emotions and feelings, then put on some music. Pick an emotion/feeling from your list and move to it. Stay with it until you are ready to move on and then pick another one from your list. Do this for a few songs. You might be surprised at your movements. You will probably be able to create ways to move that you didn’t realize. When you are not thinking of your movements it allows your body to release and —- ahhhh! —- movement creativity. Go ahead, you can do it. Let us know how it goes!
Nia, the dance exercise that I teach, is a great cardio workout. Classes are fun and full of energy. To become a Nia teacher one must take the White Belt Intensive. It is 40+ hours of intense learning, discovery, play, dance, reading, listening, moving, sitting, and so much more. A person that is just interesting in learning more about Nia as a practice may also take the intensive. One does not have to have the intention of teaching to participate in an intensive. In the Nia White Belt there are 13 Principles. These principles are what teachers and practitioner use to expand their Nia practice. Working and playing with the principles actually help bodies to move “better”. Nia is a body centered exercise so these principles actually help us move our bodies. The fourth Nia White Belt principle is FreeDance, this principle has eight stages. The list of the eight stages is in my post Nia Class – Levels 1, 2, 3 – FreeDance Stage 8. The fifth stage is Authentic Movement – Change.
Nia is “about” many things. One thing Nia is about is Authentic movement. Our dance is not a performance. It is not meant to be pretty. It is meant to allow us to move in our own body’s way. The idea is that we will move in our own body’s’ way and we will move as we need to move. With freedom and authenticity we will be working our bodies as they each individually need to be worked. Yes, we do have specific steps in a kata or song. But everyone’s body does the steps maybe a little differently — to their own body’s ability. With practice the body will be able to do the steps and the moves in the Body’s Way, moving the way the body was actually designed to move.
With authentic movement we are letting the body move to the music in its own way. We don’t think of how to move it, we just let it sense the music and it moves. If one is practicing the Nia White Belt Principle #4, stage 5, then the authentic movement is done for two bars, two measures of how we count our music. After two bars change the movement. Do this for each song. The idea is that after a few songs the body will have gone through all of its “normal” movements. You will have danced out all of your movement tendencies. You will have danced all of your bodies patterns and your body will seek new moves. Your body will do things it does not usually do. You might be one that often moves your hips a lot, but after a few songs and continually changing the way you move your hips you might realize that you are out of hip moves, so your body plants your feet and you end up kicking up one leg at a time. Maybe kicking is not part of your typical dance move repertoire. Maybe once your legs start kicking your arms start punching. And this was not thought out or planned it just seemed natural. Leg kick, arm punch.
So the idea is to exhaust the normal and journey into new territory. If you have never done anything like this I want to warn you, you might be a little sore the next day. If you are a booty shaker and you change to a “how-low-can-you-go-er” you will feel it the next morning. If you always keep both feet on the ground and you start kicking or even just doing knee lifts to be different, your body will remind you the next day that you did something different.
If you let your body just dance to the music and switch it up, your body will give you great feed back on how you have never moved your foot/arm/head/butt/ankle/knee/whatever-you-moved-that-was-new the next day. You will go to move foot/arm/head/butt/ankle/knee/whatever-you-moved-that-was-new and probably sense it. This information will help you learn your movement tendencies and you can learn what new moves might help you improve your body’s movements.
Try it! Put on some music and dance with Authentic Movement, then change. Keep doing this through at least five songs and see where you end up. See what new moves your body comes up with. Ready? Go!
The principles of the different belts in Nia provide a foundation for our Nia practice. There are 13 Principles in the Nia White Belt. The fourth principle is FreeDance, this principle has eight stages. Eight things you can focus on that can become a part of FreeDance. When I attended my Nia White Belt Intensive we danced through these stages when we danced FreeDance. Dancing through the stages is something that can be done for fun. It doesn’t have to be because you do Nia. It can help you express yourself by turning on some music and applying the stages to the music. Dancing through the stages is also used as a technique for Nia teachers to become better aquainted with the Nia music. It is a tool that can help in learning a Nia routine. The seventh stage of FreeDance is Choreography, the tagline is: The Accidental “Click”.
I mentioned in my post about the eighth stage of FreeDance, Nia Class – Levels 1, 2, 3, that I often skip over dancing the first six stages of FreeDance when learning a Nia routine. Part of the reason is because I actually forgot about it being a step. I don’t skip them entirely, I do FreeDance about four of the stages to the music, but I don’t do all of them. I do believe that doing all six can be a great tool, so as I mentioned, I am working on implementing this action back into my “learning of a Nia routine”. Today in fact I started employing it with a the next routine I am learning.
Stage 7 of FreeDance, Choreography – The Accidental “Click”, is something that probably happens to all dancers and group fitness teachers alike. It kind of seems to happen in more than just dance actually, but with dancers the “click” is to the music. Often with the eight stages of FreeDance you are using more than one stage at a time. With experiencing the accidental click there is going to be stage two going on. There is going to be a lot of listening. The listening is to ALL of the music; the silences, the beat, the tempo, the instruments, the words the vibrations–all of it. With Nia we are taught to dance to all music, not just the kind that we turn on and can’t help but move too. We are taught to move to music we might not actually like. Many people are the type that when you turn music on something on their body starts moving. A foot might start moving, a head might bob, fingers might tap, this happens often. There seems to be some songs that EVERYBODY moves to, they just can’t help it. But then there is music that often clears the dance floor. The “everybody move to” music is easy to dance to. But the floor clearing kind sometimes can be difficult to dance to. In Nia we are taught to dance to it all. We are taught to listen to it all.
I will be the first to admit that sometimes there are songs I don’t like in a Nia routine. Sometimes there is just one noise that is to incessant or a beat that feels off, whatever the reason, I don’t like it all. Sometimes I like the music but not the moves. Sometimes I just can’t get the choreography and the music to mesh—in my head or in my body, whatever it just doesn’t work. So I keep doing that kata until it “clicks”. Eventually it will because Debbie Rosas Stewart and Carlos AyaRosas are great at creating routines, but sometimes it takes me a bit. The “click” is what state seven is about.
Stage seven is connecting to the sensation of your body. I think that often times I “don’t like it” (it being either the music or the move or whatever it is that is hanging me up) is all in my head. So if and when I stop thinking and get into the sensation of the body, I will find that the moves DO go with the music, I was just thinking they didn’t. Amazing how the thinking gets in the way of moving so often.
Here you have it the seventh stage of Nia FreeDance. Yes, I am posting about them backwards, from 8 to 1. It just happened that way. The days I went to type up a post my eyes fell on “Nia Class – Leve 1, 2, 3 for inspiration. So now I am going through the stages backwards. I bet even if you aren’t trying to learn a dance routine you can think of or recognize things in your life that click. Could be you are trying to remember a way to do something and you do it over and over and keep referring back to the instructions then one day “click”. In Nia it’s Choreography where we eventually find The Accidental “Click”, but in life it could be with anything. “Clicks” happen all the time. Even if you aren’t learning a dance routine, you’re familiar with that click, right?
In Nia there are 13 White Belt Principles. The principles provide a foundation, something we can learn, practice, explore, and build on. One Nia White Belt Principle, Principle number 7 has two parts. The second part of the principle is levels of teaching. I wrote about this when I was sharing about each Nia White Belt Principle. The three levels of teaching come up again as the eighth stage in Nia FreeDance. The eighth stage is Nia Class – Levels 1, 2, 3.
In addition to learning, practicing, exploring and building on the 13 White Belt Principles, Nia teachers are taught to use the eight stages of FreeDance to learn our routines and also to expand our Nia Practice and to have fun with Nia. FreeDancing to the music is often a step I skip. So is might go without saying that dancing the first six stages of FreeDance is something I often don’t do when I learn a routine. I am going to work on using this tool, FreeDance and its stages, to learn my routines going forward. I am also going to use this tool when I go back and practice and delve deeper into the routines I already teach.
In regards to Stage 8 – Nia Class – Levels 1, 2, 3, this is something that Nia teachers need to be able to share in a class. As I stated in my post about the second half of the 7th Nia White Belt Principle, everyone’s levels might be different, but the point is that I need to be able to show you different levels. The move itself does not change, it just might be done bigger or covering more floor. If the move is a cha-cha step, then my level 1 is a cha-cha, as well as my level 2, to make it more challenging in level 3 I don’t change it to a jazz square, I just make it bigger. Or I might even show the example of it being more bouncy. There are different ways to change the level and we all have different levels so we have different needs when it comes to changing the level.
Level 1, 2, and 3 does not necessarily mean “planes” as in low, middle, high, it means level of intensity. Now how “intensity” is interpreted DOES depend on the move. As I just mentioned it could mean bigger or more bouncy. It all depends on the move itself, but either way the spirit and the energy remains the same.
I do find that sometimes I don’t have enough time to show all three levels for all of the moves. Sometimes I just stick to level one if it appears that the move is challenging to most students. Then I might briefly demonstrate level two, but go quickly back to level one because I can sense I am going to be leaving most of the class behind. In that case, what happens is if there is a student that is ready for level three they get their on their own. It is fabulous.
I do think that it is really good for me to continue to remind my students that EVERYBODY has a different level 1, which automatically means that their level 2 is different, which dominoes into the level 3 being different. When playing with dancing freely to music it is fun as a student and a dancer to experiment with different levels of intensity of a move. Sometimes the music dictates the intensity as the music itself might change intensity. Sometimes it is just amusing to change it up to challenge the body, brain, and spirit. So, even as a student of Nia or dancer that dances because you love to move you too can also experience different levels of dancing free. This is a brief look into Nia’s FreeDance and Stage 8 Nia Class – Levels 1, 2, 3.
So today (July 31, 2010) was the Nia Jam and it was the third one that I have taught in. Cool. It was awesome. I just have to say, “Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” I know many of you feel this way because I see you post it in blogs, on Facebook, and in tweets. Just “Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” When you are with people doing what you love and they are doing it too! The Nia Jam was so beautiful and awesome. There were teachers from all over and we just danced—-and our students let us and they followed along. It was magical.
One of the creators of Nia is retiring at the end of this year. I must admit that I don’t really believe it (yes, probably denial). I mean, I believe he is leaving and I understand that, but I don’t believe that he will not be pulled back—by his own heart—into being involved somehow. I can understand that he is ready to move away from the day-to-day and all that it must involve, but I have hope that he will be doing it somehow. I picture him teaching in the city to which he is moving. I guess I will see.
The focus of the Nia Jam today was a celebration of Carlos AyaRosas. We did a jam using katas from his routines. Our intent was a thank you and a gathering of “Carlos” energy. I felt that we did a great job. I felt that our hearts were alive with gratitude for the dances he has created for us and for Nia. I felt there was a lot of “Carlos” energy! I have a feeling that he would have been honored and he would have been proud of us for sharing our love of Nia using his katas.
A Nia Jam is a great way to experience Nia. Teachers gather to co-teach. Once the music starts we just go. There is a trick sometimes to doing the microphone handoff, but it all works out in the end. Today is was joy, it was magic, it was fun, it was Nia. It was exactly what a jam should be. I like to think it is what Carlos had in mind when he created the katas we danced today.
Thank you, my Fabulous Nia Teachers. And thank you, Carlos for all that you have given to Nia.
Here is one song, this is not an example of Carlos’ choeography, because it is a Free Dance. I didn’t want to miss one minute of his dances. I could only bring myself to record a Free Dance. 🙂
Part of the purpose of my blog is to share what Nia is and to invite people to take one of my classes. I have learned that when teaching people it is sometimes helpful to share what something ISN’T to help them understand what it is.
Nia isn’t a class where you won’t sweat.
Nia isn’t a class where the teacher shouts at you to motivate you.
Nia isn’t a class where you just think about moving.
Nia isn’t Jazzercise.
Nia isn’t sitting around.
Nia isn’t about pain.
Nia isn’t hard jumping.
Nia isn’t Tai Chi.
Nia isn’t Tae Kwon Do.
Nia isn’t Aikido.
Nia isn’t a mindless workout.
Nia isn’t Zumba.
Nia isn’t taught to Nia teachers in a day.
Nia isn’t new to the fitness world.
Nia isn’t Jazz Dance.
Nia isn’t Modern Dance.
Nia isn’t judgmental.
Nia isn’t a strict combination of linear movements.
Nia isn’t a class where you are told EXACTLY how to move your own body.
I’ve posted about Nia Routines before. I explained a bit about how the routines are created and teachers can purchase them. Nia routines used to be choreographed and performed on the training DVD by Debbie Rosas or Carlos Rosas or both. I’ve also posted about the fact that Nia morphs and changes. At the end of 2010 Carlos AyaRosas, the male co-creator of Nia retired. As with any company that wants to continue on after a founder retires Nia had to make some changes. To me it seems as if Nia had been thinking about this for a while. I know when I attended my Nia White Belt Intensive both Debbie and Carlos talked about Nia continuing on after they leave. So it seems to me that they had plans and ideas for how Nia will change. I think it is evident in the way that Nia does not seem to be a flag flapping in the wind, it has true direction. With the exit of Carlos a new era has been born. Debbie is now co-creating routines with Nia Black Belt Trainers. I love Nia and enjoy both the routines Debbie created and the ones Carlos created. There are some I like more than others. I am not saying that I like the new one I have seen more than I liked the “old” ones, I am just saying, “Yay! Nia is not disappointing me.” The new routine I have looked at is just as fabulous as the old routines I love. 
Terre Pruitt's Blog 