Expressive Dance for Actors: Nia Technique

If you are an actor working on your craft, Nia Technique™ may be the perfect exercise class for you. It gives you a great cardio workout and improves your overall fitness, while also developing your craft as an actor.

Nia is a mindful dance fitness class combining dance, martial arts and the healing arts. Your teacher guides you to focus on sensation, not performance. Nia asks, how does this movement feel in your body? 

Nia classes are one hour long and consist of roughly 90% easy choreography and 10% “freedance,” when participants move however they want. The music is beautiful and inspiring, licensed from unknown artists.

All emotions are welcome in Nia.

Benefits of Nia Technique for Actors

Nia includes emotions. Unlike other fitness classes, Nia welcomes the full range of emotions during class. You can imbue Nia moves with any emotion - real or pretend, your own or your character’s. It’s safe to feel, safe to express, safe to be weird or vulnerable in Nia.

Nia increases mindfulness and sense memory skills. Nia teaches you to sense your body while moving. This helps you learn how to feel your emotions physically, in your body - which in turn helps you call up past emotions when needed for a role.

Nia helps you develop characters. Every Nia class includes multiple “energy personalities” - fast/slow, calm/excited, linear/curvy, precise/freeform. There is no right and wrong in Nia, so you can do any move with any kind of energy. That makes Nia an excellent laboratory for developing the physicality of a character. Bring your character into Nia class and see how they might do the moves!

What if I dance this like…a gorilla?

Nia expands your expressive range. Nia choreography, while very accessible, can at times be a little weird. Weird is good! Moving weird loosens up your body, breaks old movement habits and gives you more choices for how to move in character.

Nia makes you a better mover. Nia lets you build movement skill without taking on the perfectionism of dance culture. It improves your balance, coordination, and ability to learn choreography. It also increases your understanding of musical phrasing and the music-movement relationship. Even a totally non-dancing actor will become a better mover with Nia.

Nia brings out your uniqueness. Good actors bring their personal uniqueness to any role, doing it like nobody else could. It’s the same in Nia. The moves are the moves, but YOU are unique. Nia is designed to let your uniqueness show.

Nia Technique™ is fantastic for actors, physically, emotionally and craftually. Give yourself a chance to experience this inspiring movement practice!

I teach online Nia classes year round, on Zoom, with 24 hr replay. TRY A CLASS