Dance Conversation with… Sureya
There’s so many amazing teachers out there with a similar passion for preparing your body for the wonderful, intricate and expansive movements we do in our dance and minimising the risk of injury.
Last week I had the pleasure of an online live “Dance Conversation” with the amazing Sureya. I started taking classes with her as I wanted to learn more about the Turkish style of Raqs Sharqi and was overjoyed to discover that she includes a strong conditioning sequence at the start of each class too! Her classes are right up my street, I’m loving them!
When she mentioned that she didn’t really start fitness and strength training for dance until she got an injury, this sparked the idea of asking her to share her journey with you, as I hear from so many people with the same issues. Whilst dance alone is fantastic exercise for the body, mind and soul, when we start taking it more seriously, even if it’s practising regularly for the local haflas and summer festivals, it’s so important to do so from a base of strength in the body.
One of the things that really resonated in our conversation was Sureya’s commitment to continuous training and studying with lots of different teachers, both for dance and fitness. This really ties in with last week’s blog about Movement Variability - training with different teachers will continually expose you to new ways of moving the body. Even the same movements will be described in different ways by different teachers, providing different outcomes in the body!
This allows us to have a wider variety of tools at our fingertips when we want to express ourselves in dance, gives our body more options for effortless, relaxed movement when we are going about our everyday lives and offers and provides a greater likelihood of being able to recover when the body is surprised by an unexpected movement, such as an off-kilter step in a dance choreography, or accidentally tripping over the kerb in the street.
(Talking of toolboxes… The next Happy Hips Toolbox starts on 4th April - more info here!)
Here are some links to some of Sureya’s recommendations. Check out the full interview below!
Dance:
Serkan Tutar
Azad Khan
Diva Darina
Lebanese Simon
Charlotte Desorgher
Movement and Fitness:
Interconnected Fitness
Naama
Tracy Nicola
The conversation with Sureya was so much fun and it was great to get her perspective on fitness and strength for dance. I’m definitely going to be doing more of these with some other amazing teachers - watch this space.