[MUSIC PLAYING] African dance position is
usually with a wide stance, knees slightly bent, and your
pelvis out, your chest open. This is where you will be
happiest during African dance. A lot of times, if
your pelvis is dropped, then it makes all the
isolations much easier. So if I'm up here, it's
not so fun doing my hips. But if I squat, it
makes perfect sense. Because I have range of motion. So I can go to my right as
far as I can and to my left as far as I can. And you want to go
as far as you can. Right, left, right, left. That's pelvic isolation. We also go forward and back. Forward, back,
forward, back, right? But you don't want to
come up while you're going forward and back. You want to stay down. Forward, back, forward, back. All the way forward,
all the way back, right? Then once you get that, you can
go up into your African dance position. And you can actually circle to
all of those positions, right? Forward, right, back, left,
forward, right, back, left, right? You can go the other direction.
Forward, left, back,
right, forward, left, back, right– so drawing
a circle with your pelvis. You can go faster than that. Round, 2, 3, 4. And you can go left, 2, 3, 4. You can do all of the same
movements isolating your chest but making sure
that you stay down and your shoulders stay down. Don't use your shoulders to
do your chest isolations. Because then that's cheating. You have to use your chest. Keep your shoulders out of it. Here we go. We can do forward, back,
forward, back, forward, back. We can do that double-time. And forward, back,
forward, back, keeping your shoulders down,
keeping your body relaxed. Then right, left, right,
left, right, left– isolating. Don't use your pelvis while
you're isolating your chest. Here we go, double-time. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. You can go around with
your chest, which is one of the more challenging things.
But you'll see this a
lot in African dance, especially Congolese
dance, right? Another common African technique
would be to start centered in I position, I call it, and
move out of your center to come back into your center. So African dance
position, from here, would use your right
arm and leg, out and in. So you could throw it
out and throw it in. So a lot of the times, when
you're in this position, you have freedom to
throw your limbs. Throw, throw, throw, opening
your chest– throw, right? You can do that
to the left side. Throw, throw,
throw, throw, right? You want to join me and do this? This will be good just to
add a little bit of music and see how it
goes with the beat.
Because rhythm is
really important, right? So dancing like I was
doing, breaking it down, I do that very, very rarely. Because you always want to know
where the rhythm is and where you're stepping to the beat. So we're going to go
1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. Now you can throw
your chest open. [DRUMMING] Throw your chest open. Good. Now I'd like to go
double-time of this. So speeding up, [INAUDIBLE]. Perfect [INAUDIBLE]. Good. One more thing. We're going to turn
and face [INAUDIBLE] for our last African
dance technique step. You're going to put your feet
together, bend your knees, booty out. Stick your pelvis out,
and doing the same thing where we're throwing our limbs
back and bringing them back to center, right? So we're going right to center
and then left to center, right? Here we go.
5, 6, 7, 8. Right, center,
left, center, right. Keep your chest open
and your pelvis out. Right, center. Now we're going
to go double-time. And here we go. 1, 2, 3. Keep rounded. Excellent. Doing good. But I'm going to
speed it up for us.