Month For Dancer’s Health – Dancing Upside Down

Submitted by the Event Organizer

This workshop provides dancers, dance educators, and healthcare professionals with strategies to enhance safety while teaching and practicing ground-based inversions and acrobatics in dance. We’ll begin with a brief discussion of injuries related to inversions and ground acrobatics and important safety considerations for teaching them. This will be followed by a movement session starting with warm-up exercises to prepare dancers for dancing on their hands with attention to the spine and upper extremities. The presenters will share their expertise from gymnastics, circus arts, dance, and rehabilitation by demonstrating skill progressions for introducing handstand-based inversions and basic tumbling with an opportunity for participants to experience the movements. The exercises and skill progressions will be targeted to dancers, dance educators and choreographers integrating inversions or acrobatics into class or choreography and healthcare providers working to return a dancer to full performance after injury.

Stephanie Greenspan is a Doctor of Physical Therapy with post-graduate residency/fellowship training and board specialties in orthopaedic and neurologic physical therapy. She founded her own company, Artletic Science in 2021, with the mission to enhance the health and performance of artist athletes through research, education, and physical therapy. As a clinician, she works with recreational to professional level circus artists and dancers with a focus on decreasing injury risk and optimizing performance. As an Adjunct Associate Professor at Samuel Merritt University, she studies injuries in circus artists and 3D motion analysis with electromyography in aerialists. She chairs the Surveillance of Injuries for Research on Circus (SIRC) working group that created a consensus statement for injury surveillance in circus and is co-editor of the Sciences section for the journal Circus Arts, Life and Sciences.

Alyssa Herrera-Set is the owner of On the Move Physical Therapy, a lecturer at University of California, San Francisco, the co-founder of an online women’s health company called Papaya Health, and the co-founder of gymSAFE, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the health of gymnasts. She is passionate about detecting movement patterns that lead to injury.  She enjoys building programs that help dancers and athletes develop good movement habits.  Dr. Herrera-Set focused her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley on education and ethnic studies.  She received her master’s and doctorate degrees in physical therapy through UCSF/SFSU.  She earned a Sports Physiotherapy diploma from the International Olympic Committee.  Her movement philosophy is influenced by her lifelong participation in dance and gymnastics, her experience as a dance and gymnastics teacher, and her pilates education through Polestar Pilates. 

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.