Contemporary Dancing Triplets and Side Falls

Theresa D'Alessandro: Hi, I am Theresa D'Alessandro, the Director of the School of Theatrical Dance. We are going to be sharing with you some of the basic techniques of contemporary dance. In this segment you will learn the side fall and the triplet step. The side fall is rather complicated, it involves a retir and control to the floor and catching your weight with control on the foot and then the knee and then hands, Joanie is going to demonstrate it for us. Drawing up the right knee to retir, arching her body to the side, she controls coming down to the floor on to the knee into a chest press and then back up to the knees and to a standing position. She will repeat this on the second side, there is a lot of balance involved here, she arches over with the control onto one foot and down to chest press to the floor. The next step you are going to learn is a staple of contemporary dance. It's a triplet which takes you from a low to a high level at the same time traveling across your performance space. Dana and Stormie are prepared with their right foot back and their body spiraled to the left. If they step on to the right foot, they rotate to the right and relev, relev and reverse pli left, relev, relev.

In our next segment we are going to teach you your performance piece tying in all the contemporary dance movements that we have taught you so far.