Dance Anatomy - Jacqui Haas

Dance Anatomy

by Jacqui Haas

NEW, 208 pages

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About Dance Anatomy

Powerful, expressive, and compelling! Now you can see what it takes to be a stronger, more elegant dancer. Featuring over 200 full-color illustrations, Dance Anatomy visually depicts the unique relationship between muscle development and aesthetic movement as never before.

Dance Anatomy features 82 of the most effective dance, movement, and performance exercises, each designed to promote perfect alignment, improved placement, proper breathing, and prevention of common injuries. In stunning detail, the accompanying illustration captures the dancer in motion and highlights the active muscles associated with each movement.

You’ll learn how to modify exercises to target specific areas to enhance flexibility and reduce muscle tension. You’ll also learn to put it all together to personalize a program based on your style of dance, level of expertise, and individual needs and goals.

Whether you seek to optimize performance, add a new movement to your repertoire, or minimize muscle fatigue, stress, and injury, Dance Anatomy is your perfect partner.

About Jacqui Greene Haas

Jacqui Greene Haas has been the athletic trainer for the Cincinnati Ballet since 1989, is the director of dance medicine academic seminars, and is the director of the dance medicine division of Wellington Orthopedics in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she treats dancers in physical therapy, postsurgical rehabilitation, and general conditioning. 

A former professional ballet dancer with Boston Ballet, Southern Ballet Theatre, Tampa Ballet, New Orleans Ballet, and Cincinnati Ballet, Jacqui holds a BA in dance from the University of South Florida and an athletic training certificate from the University of Cincinnati. She also has a certificate in Pilates instruction from St. Francis Memorial Hospital dance division in San Francisco and a certificate in Pilates rehabilitation from Polestar Education in Miami, Florida. She has developed injury-prevention programs for numerous dance studios as well as the McGing Irish Dancers, the School for Creative and Performing Arts, and the University of Cincinnati dance department. 

Jacqui is a frequent presenter, speaking to dancers, instructors, and health care practitioners, including presentations at the International Association of Dance Medicine and Science and the National Athletic Trainers’ Association conferences. She has been published in Dance magazine and Advance Rehabilitation magazine. 

Reviews

“Jacqui Haas covers all the basics that dancers should know about the incredible instrument that is the human body. Dance Anatomy is well written, informative, and full of creative ways to keep dancers healthy and dancing to their full potential!”

Marika Molnar, PT, LAc 

“Dance Anatomy brings to life the relationship between muscle development and dancing. It is a must-read for every dancer.”

Victoria Morgan

Artistic Director and CEO
Cincinnati Ballet

About Dance

Dance is an art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting.

Dance may also be regarded as a form of nonverbal communication between humans, and is also performed by other animals (bee dance, patterns of behaviour such as a mating dance). Gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are sports that incorporate dance, while martial arts kata are often compared to dances. Motion in ordinarily inanimate objects may also be described as dances (the leaves danced in the wind).

Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic, artistic and moral constraints and range from functional movement (such as folk dance) to virtuoso techniques such as ballet. Dance can be participatory, social or performed for an audience. It can also be ceremonial, competitive or erotic. Dance movements may be without significance in themselves, such as in ballet or European folk dance, or have a gestural vocabulary/symbolic system as in many Asian dances. Dance can embody or express ideas, emotions or tell a story.

Dancing has evolved many styles. Breakdancing and Krumping are related to the hip hop culture. African dance is interpretative. Ballet, Ballroom, Waltz, and Tango are classical styles of dance while Square and the Electric Slide are forms of step dances.

Every dance, no matter what style, has something in common. It not only involves flexibility and body movement, but also physics. If the proper physics is not taken into consideration, injuries may occur.

Choreography is the art of creating dances. The person who creates (i.e., choreographs) a dance is known as the choreographer.

Dance does not leave behind clearly identifiable physical artifacts such as stone tools, hunting implements or cave paintings. It is not possible to say when dance became part of human culture. Dance has certainly been an important part of ceremony, rituals, celebrations and entertainment since before the birth of the earliest human civilizations. Archeology delivers traces of dance from prehistoric times such as the 9,000 year old Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka paintings in India and Egyptian tomb paintings depicting dancing figures from c. 3300 BC.

One of the earliest structured uses of dances may have been in the performance and in the telling of myths. It was also sometimes used to show feelings for one of the opposite gender. It is also linked to the origin of "love making." Before the production of written languages, dance was one of the methods of passing these stories down from generation to generation.

Another early use of dance may have been as a precursor to ecstatic trance states in healing rituals. Dance is still used for this purpose by many cultures from the Brazilian rainforest to the Kalahari Desert.

Sri Lankan dances goes back to the mythological times of aboriginal yingyang twins and "yakkas" (devils). According to a Sinhalese legend, Kandyan dances originate, 250 years ago, from a magic ritual that broke the spell on a bewitched king. Many contemporary dance forms can be traced back to historical, traditional, ceremonial, and ethnic dance.

Dance Anatomy