Partner work is not just about nailing an overhead press, says Eduardo Permuy, Atlanta Ballet’s company répétiteur. It’s a fact he stresses even for the younger students he teaches in the school. “ It’s not just about going onstage and picking your partner up. You create something together.”
Of course, foundational skills are necessary to take that art from studio to stage. Edyta Śliwińska, an instructor and former professional on “Dancing with the Stars,” spent many years on the Dansport circuit. Whether in class, rehearsal, or performance, she says, even a dancer’s relationship to the music needs to be reframed in partnered work. “ If something happens,” she explains, “ your priority is to move together, even if you are off-music.”
Whether you’re teaching beginning partner classes or coaching dancers through more complicated lifts and choreography, our experts recommend these best practices for guiding your students in successful partnering.
Before Liftoff
Śliwińska says that teachers need to be realistic when pairing students with varying body types. During her “DWTS” days, the choreography needed to be adapted if she was paired with someone close to her own height. “ I’m quite tall for a dancer, so it was always difficult for me to do the acrobatic lifts with a lot of changes of positions and twists.” If you have a group with partners very close in height, “ opt for lifts that are more linear,” Śliwińska suggests.
Once the students are paired and ready to work, it’s up to the teacher to set a safe, supportive environment. “ Word choice can be so important,” says Karl Watson, company manager and director of education at Seattle-based dance company Whim W’him. Rather than talking about one dancer as needing to be “light” or “floaty” and the other being “strong” to lift, for example, “ we talk about climbing on each other like a jungle gym,” Watson says. “One person might be the supportive person, but the person who’s in the air has a ton of agency.” Both dancers are active in the art form, no matter what genders or body types are paired. At Whim W’him, and throughout today’s professional dance world, Watson states that “everyone needs to get comfortable being lifted by everyone.”
Cross-Training
Of course, strength is important, but partnered lifts hardly require huge biceps. Permuy says it’s much more about core strength and the lower body to lift, “with the legs and not the back.” He notes that good form is crucial for injury prevention: “ Especially teens who have growth spurts, it’s a little bit more challenging when they’re on the smaller side. But then at 18, 19 they start getting a little bit more strength.”
Yet, it’s important even for professionals to maintain that strong core when days get long and tiring, says Permuy, so students should find strength-training routines they can implement in their post-school careers. Watson prefers resistance-band training that incorporates full-body movements—like a squat to an overhead press—to static exercises, like planks, where the kinetic energy gets stuck in the core. He feels static exercises are better viewed as a complementary approach rather than functional in training for partnering movements.
Weight-Sharing Warm-Ups
Rarely is it a good idea to launch—literally—into complicated lifts first thing in class. Watson suggests a contact-improvisation warm-up with “partnering transits,” different pathways to change your points of contact with another person. For example, in a rolling contact, you might have paired dancers start with their palms as the point of contact, then roll onto the backs of the hands, the arms, the shoulders, all the way through to turn around until they are back to back with their partners. Start with no weight bearing, then gradually increase the range of motion until they are fully sharing or transferring their weight with their partners, building rhythm and trust for bigger lifts.
Amping It Up
Classical ballet partnering often encourages students to find a weightless feeling—setting a dancer down onto a perfectly centered leg with no weight between the supporting dancer’s hands. However, Watson says that this framing may not be the most useful when it comes to dynamic contemporary work, or to adapting when weight sharing goes awry. “If I’m in a place where I don’t really have a good sense of where my partner’s weight is, I’m actually in a riskier position. In the more contemporary work, I need to understand how extreme my partner’s weight is on a diagonal or over me.” You can have your students test those extremes in the studio, coming in and out of lifts.
When getting into complicated or daring choreography, Śliwińska is not afraid to use spotters or crash pads in class. Yet, before relying on external assistance, the first thing is to make sure that students are working from a place of trust and synchronicity. Timing is everything, she says. “You can practice the momentum, the little jump preparation several times, to get that timing together before going all the way to the lift. The most important thing for me is that we get that momentum and timing together so no one gets injured, no one gets dropped, no one pulls any muscles,” she says.
Permuy adds that it is just as important for students to train their communication and empathy skills as their physical technique when working closely with another person. “The most important thing is getting to a mindset of not placing blame,” he says. “That’s what I tell our dancers and younger kids: It’s a 50/50 partnership.”
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