We all want to maintain a “good posture” while dancing. But what does “good posture” mean? At its best, posture is an invaluable tool used to enhance the experience of the dance, while it often becomes simply a mechanism to enhance stress, self-criticism, and judgement. There is so much confusion and contradictory information regarding alignment that we may not even know good posture when we see it. And even when we do have an idea of what we want, it is often difficult to know what changes we need to make, or what feelings tell us when we are in or out of alignment. Here is a cue that I have found helpful for my own posture, and hopefully will be similarly useful for your own posture quest.
First a little anatomy. The diaphragm is a big dome-shaped muscle that attaches to the bottom of your rib cage and allows you to breathe. The pelvic floor is a more-or-less bowl-shaped series of muscles that connect between your tailbone and pubic bone. As shown in the figure below (correct posture on the far left), we want to have the dome of the diaphragm directly opposite the bowl of the pelvic floor.[1] Aligning the diaphragm and pelvic floor makes it easier to breath, find balance, and transmit force through our body.
When the diaphragm lines up with the pelvic floor, it creates a pill shape in the middle of your body. For me, this shape looks an awful lot like a minion. My posture cue for you is to make your minion and keep your minion. We make our minion by aligning the pelvic floor and diaphragm, and we avoid mashing our minion by keeping this alignment as we dance.
Here is something to help you make and keep your minion. When you breathe in, your diaphragm contracts and moves downwards towards the abdomen. With proper alignment, your pelvic floor lowers along with the diaphragm to make space. Your diaphragm and pelvic floor work like a piston, moving down and up with each breath. The feeling when you are in alignment is as if you breath into your hips. Of course, the air stays in your lungs, so what you are really feeling is your guts sliding down into the space created by your pelvic floor. But “breathing into your hips” is a good description of the sensation of breathing with correct alignment.
The sensation of your breath goes into whichever body part is directly opposite your diaphragm, so you may feel the breath in your belly, side, upper back, or lower back depending on how you are out of alignment. You can try this yourself, experimenting with different posture positions and noticing where you feel the breath go. The feeling of our breath can tell us when we are in alignment (the breath goes into our hips) and can tell us how we are out of alignment (depending on where else the breath goes).
Next time you are working on your posture, try aligning your diaphragm and pelvic floor—making and keeping your minion—and try sensing where in your body your breath goes.
[1] The figure is from the article “Breathing IS NOT Bracing” by Chris Duffin, which can be found here https://www.elitefts.com/education/breathing-is-not-bracing/ It is also where I first read of the concept of aligning the diaphragm with the pelvic floor.