Injury Prevention For Street Dancers (IPS)

Class Description: Moderate to severe back or joint pain commonly plague street dancers, and medical intervention often provides only a temporary fix.  Longevity is born from consistency and awareness, not intensity. The Happy Body principles, devised by Olivia O’Hare based on decades of work and research in a broad spectrum of exercise systems (e.g. contemporary Pilates, the Franklin Method, and various Somatics practices), teach how to incorporate movements for injury prevention into your personal and pedagogical practice. This workshop introduces the principles through a brief discussion followed by exploration through structured improvisation. Additionally, an hour-long flow sequence designed in collaboration with Rennie Harris covers the fundamental movements directly applicable to street dance, including sensing/embodiment, shaking, spiraling, strengthening, and stretching. By the end of the workshop, you’ll understand how to train smarter, not harder, and how to warm-up for dancing with less potential for injury and pain.

Bio: Olivia realized early on that exploration of how the human body moves is her true calling. With over 25 years of experience in the fitness industry, her curiosity led her to study aspects of movement in dance, somatics, Pilates, yoga, fitness training, and physical theatre. Olivia completed coursework toward the PhD in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin where she focused on movement theory and analysis of the DanceAbility method and contact improvisation. She believes that body awareness, movement, and an understanding of non-verbal communication are essential parts of the human experience and should be made accessible to all people. Olivia supported Rennie Harris on his own healing journey starting in 2019. Their work together inspired an on-going collaboration to develop a series of movement principles and exercise sequences for street dancers to increase strength, mobility, awareness, and resiliency with an eye toward injury prevention.