Acrobatic Dancing Practice
Back Bend
Stand erect. Spread the feet about fifteen inches apart. Have the toes pointed well out, at about a sixty degree angle. Raise the arms directly overhead, the hands shoulder-width apart. Put your head back, pushing forward with your knees. Lean back, bending the arms as far back as you can, till the palms of the hands rest on the floor. In doing the back bend, relax the lower jaw and keep the mouth slightly open to breathe. Throw the strain of the bend in the small of the back. To come up, acquire a little rocking motion forward and back, lean forward, and you will come up easily.
How to do a back bend while standing near a wall.
Stand about 3 feet from the wall, with your back to the wall, feet about two feet apart. Bend back, touch the wall with the palms and walk down the wall with your hands until you touch the floor. Then walk up with your hands until you are erect.
The Back Bend on the Flat, and Near a Wall
Hand Stand
Take a wide step forward with the left foot, place both hands flat on the floor at least eighteen inches apart in front of the left toe, fingers open and pointed directly front, right leg perfectly straight, extended straight back. Swing the right leg up and over and follow it with the left leg, and when you come down bring down the left leg first, then the right leg, bringing the left knee close up to the chest. Do not kick hard or you will go over.
How to do a hand stand while standing near a wall.
Advance whichever foot comes natural to you to do this act (people are right and left footed as well as right and left handed); let us say your right foot. Stand facing the wall with the right foot advanced to within about two feet of it. Place both hands on the floor, about eighteen inches apart, in front of left foot, fingers open and pointed front, right leg extended back and straight. Kick up with the left foot over your back so as to bring the soles of both feet against the wall, the left foot reaching the wall first; knees straight, heels together.
The Hand Stand on the Flat (A, B), and Near a Wall
Cartwheel
The cartwheel is the hand stand done sidewise. Instead of kicking up, as in the hand stand, put one hand down and then the other, going sidewise, kicking your feet up. Keep your head back, so as to retain your sense of direction.
The Cartwheel
One of my star pupils in acrobatic dancing is Miss Evelyn Law, a principal dancer of the “Follies,” and in “Louie the Fourteenth.” She came to me four years ago, a little girl fifteen years old. There are few girls who have worked so hard to succeed as has Evelyn, and there are certainly few who have achieved the top line in their profession as quickly as she has. In every respect, Miss Law is a credit to the American stage. She started in her first appearance in an engagement which I got for her at a salary of $75.00 a week. Then her salary jumped to $125.00 a week, in “Two Little Girls in Blue,” plus her mother’s fare; later, as a featured member of the “Follies,” which engagement I was also very happy to secure for her, her weekly salary reached the $750.00 mark. But Evelyn deserves her good fortune, because she has worked hard. Indeed, no girl could do the remarkable work which she is doing were she to live anything but a life of rigorous attention to every detail pertaining to health and physical fitness. She not only has ability, but she has the capacity for putting her heart into her job. She writes: “The encouragement which I have received urges me on to greater effort; and I am constantly trying to improve myself. I realize that only by constantly striving can I hope to win the recognition of producers and at the same time please the public.” She writes of her present work that it is “a privilege which must be honored by my unflagging effort to put forth my best.”
There’s inspiration for all my dancing pupils in Evelyn Law’s success.