Folding over bent leg

With a certain obsessive focus I return from three weeks of holidays to come back to the last theme I was teaching….the raising and lowering of the head will be familiar from the Lowering the head lesson.

But in addition to the raising and lowering is something a little different…when you slide your arms out along the floor, what kind of movement is this for your spine (and everything connected of course)? Not just the extension you know from Lifting on the stomach, but another kind of lengthening….after which we come back to this idea of lifting on the stomach but with a different perspective. (Not to mention with one leg folded up under you in a crazy way!)

At the end you lift your head. What else could you lift? Where would you take this movement next?

Or check out a few youtube versions of the dying swan and look for what’s different for these dancers–

Uliana Lopatkina doing it the way it “should” be done (particularly 2:00 to 2:20):

And Allen Dennis camping it up in drag (at 2:40-3:00):