DAY 2 -- Postural Assessments

The students learned a long list of new vocabulary words today, including anterior and posterior, superior and inferior, lateral and medial, to name a few.  We learned three planes and the various body actions to do while inside of those planes:

• Sagittal -- flexion, extension, hyperextension
• Frontal -- abduction and adduction
• Transverse -- rotation 

Students gave verbal directions to a brave soul standing in the center of the circle and they had to do a movement to represent the cue like, "do a distal arm movement with abduction in the frontal plane", or "rotate the inferior part of your body in the transverse plane".  The students also demonstrated movement's from Carolyn Adams' technique class and Erika Pujic's repertory rehearsal as we described and evaluated them.

Then we put markers on bony landmarks of the body to begin to assess posture.  Our skeletal assessment considered typical deviations such as forward head, lumbar lordosis, kyphosis, swayback, among others.

You can see Stacy finding the range of motion in Sabrina's knee joint.  Stacy has two green markers near her lower back on her PSIS, posterior superior iliac spine.  The dancers assessed their partner and took careful notes on alignment while also investigating the spine for scoliosis, or curves in the spine, which you can see here:

It was a pretty intense day of assessment and new information gathering.  I asked the students to think about and journal on the process of assessing their partner: feeling for bony landmarks on another body -- which can be strange at times!  Hopefully we'll hear what some have to say about today's class .....