Ironically, decades after ending my career as a professional ballet dancer, I am more aware of my body than ever. It sounds impossible to believe, doesn’t it? I only wish I had discovered yoga earlier, before all those years I was a dancer with no real relationship with my body because I didn’t know how to live in it fully. By its very nature, dance forces dancers to stay focused, but it’s too easy to keep the focus narrowed to a pinpoint, and miss out on other important elements of life. But dancers are human first, and it serves us to explore other avenues that may seem completely unrelated to dance, but aid in our evolution as both dancers and people. For me, and lots of other dancers, yoga is one of those things.

Deep breathing is one of the primary tools that a yoga practice provides. Although breathing is involuntary, there is breathing and there is b-r-e-a-t-h-i-n-g. Ancient yogic scriptures state that we have only so many breaths in a given lifetime, so it follows that extending each one of them will prolong existence. Even more importantly, deep, full breaths mean more oxygen to the body and therefore more power to every we move we make.

Heightened awareness of every single cell of the body is another incredible benefit of yoga. Proper placement is key in all yoga poses, just as it is in dance. But specific tips, such as aligning or stacking bones and joints actually teach us to create strength in all postures by building from a firm foundation. Each movement is dynamically conscious; breathing is linked with alignment. Check points for each pose are verbally offered throughout class and practitioners conduct an interior inspection to make sure all points are lined up where they need to be. Suddenly you know exactly where your little toe on your right foot ought to be, or if the joint between your thumb and first fingers really is pressed firmly into the floor. It’s almost as if we reclaim every last remote corner of the body, one cell at a time. It is an entirely new level of awareness of the body’s moving parts.

But the most valuable piece that yoga provides is peace of mind. Who couldn’t use a little bit more of that? Breathing in a deep and controlled manner, moving the body gently and consciously, produces this lovely, blissful effect. By keeping the mind focused on only two things (breath and conscious movement), it lets go of all other things. Laundry lists, chores, problems, anxieties or concerns all fall by the wayside for that blissful hour or so of class time. Each yoga class is a chance to go on a mini-retreat inside of ourselves and just be.

The challenge, of course, is to take everything that you’ve learned out into the world with you. Whether you are a dancer or not, a regular yoga practice provides the tools to deal with the challenges that everyone faces from time to time. This body, this lifetime, this moment can be all the more vibrant when met with true awareness.

If you love the Beatles and ballet, then this slice of news should bring a smile to your face: Paul McCartney, ex-Beatles band member, has just been commissioned to write music for a ballet. Details are a secret at this point; McCartney only said, “I don’t know much about it,” but he is very excited to try something new and different. One has to wonder what the costumes will look like, and who the lucky dancers will be…

Since 1982, Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet has been revolutionizing the world of ballet in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. The company is known for its unique approach to choreography; at once dynamic and original, it is a synthesis of a variety of cultural traditions and classical ballet, yielding a vocabulary of movement that is unprecedented. In the past, King has collaborated with a diverse group, including celebrated tabla drum master Zakir Hussein, musicians and dancers from the Lobaye Forest of Central African Republic, and Shaolin monks.

The company performs annually in the spring and fall in the Bay Area, and tours worldwide during the rest of the year. They have been featured in dance festivals in Montpellier, Wolfsburg and Holland, and enjoyed success in Venice and France, among others. During the summer 2010 season, they will appear in South Korea, France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom presented the 2nd Annual Mayor’s Art Award to Alonzo King in October 2008, calling him a “San Francisco treasure”. He has been honored with numerous other awards, such as the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award, the US Artists Fellowship (given to the 50 finest artists from all disciplines currently creating work in America), and the Bessie Award for Choreographer/Creator, the NEA Choreographer’s Fellowship, the Irvine Dance Fellowship, and five Isadora Duncan awards.

The Alonzo King LINES Dance Center offers classes to teens and adults, honoring their commitment of education and community involvement. Alonzo King LINES Ballet School trains young ballet dancers through year-round and summer programs. Recently, King teamed up with Dominican University to offer a BFA program in dance. It is the only BFA program in the country that is led by an active, world-renowned choreographer.

For more information about LINES, visit them online: http://www.linesballet.org/

Say the word “ballerina” and most people will picture her in a tutu. Tutus have long been the most revered form of ballet costume; their angelic frothiness adds at magic quality to the look of a ballerina. When she wears one, she looks like a sugary confection that belongs on the grandest of cakes. While many are familiar with the word “tutu”, most have no idea why is a tutu called a tutu, or anything about its history.

It is said that the first tutu was worn in Paris, by Marie Taglioni, during her 1832 performance of La Sylphide. Taglioni’s tutu was short enough to reveal her infamous footwork. This time period was known as the Romantic period in ballet costume history, and this tutu was called the Romantic tutu. This long, floating, ethereal style is made with 3-5 layers of tulle.

Over time, the tutu grew shorter and shorter in length to reveal more of the intricate footwork that dancers performed. Over the next fifty years, the hemline crept higher and higher up the leg, until it looked more like today’s bell tutu, a softer, longer style first worn by the Italian ballerina Virginia Zucci in the 1880s. This first Classical tutu style ended just above the ballerina’s knees. Later, the tutu shrank even further to become the Classical tutu, or Pancake tutu, the final product of the tutu evolution. This type of tutu has a stiff skirt that juts out horizontally from the hips, with hooping (encased petticoat wire tacked within its layers) to help it retain its shape and stiffness.

George Balanchine developed one final category of tutu styles, known as the powderpuff tutu. It is similar to the Classic tutu, but does not have hooping, and contains fewer layers of tulle, making it softer and more flowing than the traditional Pancake tutu.

The name, however, came from the ballet viewers in the “cheap seats”. As previously dicussed, the length of the tutu was dictated by the ballet patrons, who wished to see the spectacular feats that the dancers were performing. Long ago, the people in the audience who bought cheaper tickets sat in the lower part of the theater, and often had a peek under ballerinas’ skirts… at their bottoms! Of course this caused quite a bit of talk… baby talk, that is. The French baby talk word for this part of the anatomy is “cucu”, which eventually became “tutu”.

Obviously, the name stuck. However, it is a bit amusing to consider origin of the name of one of the most revered costumes of one of the most revered forms of dance. Tutus are and ever shall be tutus; lovely to look at and fun to talk about.