"Beautiful Day" - a new routine by JAG and others

 Beautiful Day

...is a collaborative project, over two years in the making and involving dozens of Nia teachers. It was originally a project called Natural Time. After scrapping the project multiple times, I finally ended up with something I liked, and named it Beautiful Day after the song by Laid Back and Anders Trentmøller that appears in the routine. 

Nancy Hammett (Nia Brown Belt, Milford CT) was largely responsible for helping me put the playlist together. Mark Frossard (Nia Black Belt, Santa Fe NM) choreographed the warm up song "Dissolving Time" by H.U.V.A. Network and Debbie Rosas (co-founder of Nia, Portland, OR) contributed largely to the rest by creating a routine called Sanjana which I adapted to fit the music for the majority of the routine.

Musically there is a fun theme of adaptation as well, as three of the songs took older songs and reworked them significantly. Deodato took Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (well known as the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey) and gave it a jazz-disco feel. David Keeper gave Johannes Brahms' "Hungarian Dance #5" an electronic dance music treatment, and Groove Armada riffed on and sampled Fairport Convention's "Autopsy" for a song they call "Remember". 

The focus of the routine is "cultivating and maintaining a feeling of peace by sensing the ease and stability of lovingly accepting all of your movements without forcing, judging or struggling". And the intent of the routine is "Choosing to enjoy this Beautiful Day".

The wide variety of moves are simple and repetitive enough to give the student plenty of opportunity to get really into the sense of acceptance and the feelings of peace within the dance. This routine leaves me feeling revitalized and uplifted. This song is NOT in the routine, but it captures the feeling so well, I wanted to include it here.




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