The Exciting Role of Dance in Fitness
3 Routines: Beyoncé, Aaliyah, Madonna. And a mention of Smack My Bitch Up.
All of you reading this have engaged in some form of physical activity at different stages in your life. So picture this curious scenario:
Imagine a massively energetic free roaming warm upârecently itâs been to the sound of Smack My Bitch Up by The Prodigy, sometimes with another song or two to get the blood moving, muscles warm, heart rate up and joints alive.
Then exploring a specific dance routine by some major artist to which we add a bit more to every week.
And thatâs before we do our all strength, floor work, flexibility and so on. Naturally we donât pause that much, and music provides our pulse throughout.
Fitness is great, but fitness also adores goals, not just arbitrary lifting weights or zone 2 trainingâwhich is important, and we all should be doing that stuffâbut more developed goals come with other rewards, and in engaging those goals we transcend the mere pursuit of fitness itself.
This might happen for different people in different ways: for the competitive athlete involved in their particular sport, the martial artist applying their accumulated skills in sparring or combat, or through something with more artistic physical demands like dance.
The session I described at the beginning is a real one I do. And it wasnât planned, it just happened. It came from the Gods themselves.
Itâs energetic, alive, and yes we have incorporated danceâas in real routines with choreographyâinto our session for a long time.
And we always have music throughout the whole thing. Sometimes the mood has been like our own private nightclub. We have a lot of fun. We are the MTV generation. And fitness should be fun.
So, it had been on my mind for some time that it would be interesting to have a look at the music for the last three dance routines we didâand which in one case was quite different from any original choreography and discuss these songs.
1. Beyoncé, Baby Boy 2003
We had done a variety of things up to then, but at this point rather than looking for something new, I decided to reach back in timeâto what I knewâwhen I was doing dance 20 years agoâand this song was super big in those circles at the time and I always liked it.
Here, I didnât use any choreography from the video, instead I pulled choreography together from a range of routines and added some of my own, although there was a base routine that someone had done to the song I started with, so it was quite different to this and nowhere near as girly. It was a tough routine!
Along the way doing this, itâs always interesting to discover things I didnât know about a particular track or artist. Like I didnât know anything about Scott Storch who produced the song, and how he blew a 100 million on drugs, cars and women!
2. Aaliyah, More Than a Woman (2001)
With Aaliyah, this one we did quite close to the original choreography, with some small modifications and swaps but I changed little of impact with it. In this case we did the first verse and first chorus, and I took some elements from the second chorus I liked and moved them to the first.
This routine was probably the most feminine in tone we did. But I love the descriptive nature of the moves that are interpretive of the lyrics themselves,
Passion, instant, sweat beads, feel me
Cupid's shot me, heartbeat's racing
Aaliyahâs choreographer for thisâand most of her other big routinesâ was Fatima Robinson (Fatima Noir on Instagram). When we were doing this I asked her a question about this routine, although she did not answer.
And I also discovered this YouTube channel at the time, who covered Aaliyah a lot.
A lot of fun to do this routine and always loved the song.
3. Madonna, Donât Tell Me (2000)
This was our most recent routine and a huge triumph.
Although I kept it overwhelmingly intact and true to the original, certainly in spirit, here I changed some bits of choreography, partly for practical reasons, partly because I didnât think one section of the original choreography made as much sense outside of the video with Madonna performing it, and I think some parts are stronger than others.
Itâs also interesting to see subsequent live performances over the years and how the routine has changed some.
For instance, the opening move of the dance break in the video is very fiddly to pull off, so I made it easier, and then I noticed Madonna herself hasnât even tried to do it for over 20 years or more, while her dancers do something similar, but different. It may be itâs too hard to sing and do that on stage, and/or routines themselves simply evolve.
Despite it being Madonna, I would say the routineâmore so with the particular edits I madeâcan be planted in a more masculine energy overall, while the line dance influence made it a good contrast to our previous two.
Apparently, I found out, the song started as something casual Madonnaâs brother in law wrote. I always liked it a lot!
So there it is. The last three songs, although weâve done quite a few others too.
OhâŠI almost forgotâŠwhat I didnât say. These are not teenagers, young adults or even parents whoâs children have just left for university who do this, no, but a wonderful couple who are far from young in chronological years, which makes it all the more impressive.
Yet they are extremely young in other ways and Iâm very proud of them and how incredibly well they have done. And remember this is only one part of what we do. We do all the âusualâ fitness as well, in fact the usual fitness is by far most of what we do.
And yeah we really do warm up to Smack My Bitch Up at the moment.
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