Dance: The art of Tracing (part 2) "Prepare your body & match your move to the original"

This entry is continuation of a previous entry on 8/15/2015, "Dance: The art of Tracing part 1"

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Step2: Prepare your body (or do a reality check)

Now you know how the original moves, and have a taste of how it feels like to move like the original. Before you trace the original seriously, you want to make sure that your body allows it.

If the original performs a high kick, split or deep squat, you might want to check your own flexibility and do appropriate warm-up to avoid injury. Make sure you can take the same posture. Unless you are a contortionist yourself, you probably cannot trace the moves by a circus contortionist.



Step 3: Match your move to the original

Even if they are doing the same move, a beginner and an advanced dancer look different, because they are not moving in the same way. It's not the pattern nor overall similarity. It's the differences in body usage, timing of the motion, attitude and presentation that make the difference. What you think you are doing and how you think your body looks are, very often, not what you are actually doing or how your body really looks.

There are plenty of internet meme about it; "What I think I look like vs What I actually look like".

Right. Too often there is a gap between them. The art of tracing is a method to aid filling the gap.


Simply put, most people don't know how they look. You need to match how you think your body looks and how your body actually looks.

There are a few tools and aids.

(i) Use a large mirror. 
Just like you wouldn't do a make up without a mirror, mirror is an indispensable tool for your presentable performance. The feedback is instant.

(ii) Use filming.
This is another effective method to know how you really look. Although mirror is better because of faster feedback, filming can complement the use of mirror. Filming can show you from different angles, and can cover the moments when you cannot look away for the mirror.


While you are watching mirror or filming, pay attention to your own body feel, and how you look. You want to be able to place your body parts exactly where they should be as the original, and you want to register how your body feel when you do that. This process is called body mapping. 

You want to feel the locations of your major joints and key body parts on both sides (shoulder, elbow, wrist, fingertips, rib cage, nipple, navel, chin, etc etc, you name it and feel where it is). Then know how you look when you move your body parts and have different feel.

If you can draw a line or curve in the air with any given body part as you want, and if the line or curve in the mirror looks exactly as you intended, you are pretty good at maneuvering your body already. For example, draw your name with your hip. If you (and someone else) can read your name, good. (It looks silly, but you don't have to practice publicly.) And the results will be great.

For this "matching" process, speed kills. You want to be precise. Don't cheat with moving quickly. Break down the motion of the original, and do everything slowly. 



Painters practice to draw, so they can draw a shape exactly as they want. Musicians practice to play instrument, so they can play the instrument exactly as they want. And dancers practice to use dancer's instrument, his/her own body, so they can dance exactly as they want. 


Tracing is like musicians practice Mozart or John Lennon (or whoever), so they learn how to create music with an instrument of their choice.



(iii) Use coaching
I don't always endorse this method for the beginners. Coaching is more effective on someone with existing skills.  Also, rather than listening to the coach, seeing self in a mirror is more believing. But if your coach knows what he/she is doing and can appropriately correct your motion, and if you have a trust in him/her and willing to listen, by all means go ahead, work with a coach.




This entry is somewhat abbreviated version of more detailed explanation for the method. But this "matching what you think you are doing and what you are actually doing" is the core of your tracing skill. 

Science: You may be able to do something about aging of your tissue

Senescence-Associated Secretory Phenotype (SASP). It is one biological phenomenon that I am interested in lately.

When animal tissues grow old, the tissues can accumulate senescent cells. Senescent cells can be generated when a cell was damaged but did not die. Senescent cells express some specific proteins that block the cell to start dividing again. That way, senescent cells are not going to proliferate. Unless they are removed (presumably by immune cells or by other causes), they are there among other cells.

My research specialty is Chromosome Instability. Cells with Chromosome Instability end up with getting damaged through mitotic errors, and they can become senescent cells as well. 


In the last 10 years or so, biologists came to know that senescent cells are secreting some factors and inflammatory cytokines that can poison, damage, and "age" surrounding tissue. Aging was contagious (!), at least in the cellular level.


A recent paper "MTOR regulates the pro-tumorigenic senescence-associated secretory phenotype by promoting IL1A translation", appeared in Nature Cell Biology (another prestigious journal), reported that SASP can be inhibited by a drug Rapamycin (Sirolimus). 

Rapamycin is a compound produced by bacteria and is known as immuno-suppressant, thus taken by recipients of organ transplant. Rapamycin is also used for cancer therapy.


An interesting fact is that mice fed with Rapamycin lived 28-38% longer (9-14% in total lifespan). 

This new paper gave an explanation; Rapamycin inhibits SASP, and cancels negative effects of senescent cells on surrounding tissue. Since negative effects of aging was at least partially cancelled, the tissues could function better, and the mice could live longer.


I don't fancy taking Rapamycin myself yet. Rapamycin is immunosuppressant, and can increase the risk of serious infection and some cancers. But with refinement, advancement in biology and cellular-level understanding in our body may provide ways to improve quality of life greatly. What if your anti-aging night cream is inhibiting SASP?

 [Notion of SASP and age-related disease, from a review by Ovadya and Krizhanovsky, Biogerontology (2014)]

Dance: The art of Tracing (Part 1) "find the original"

If you are a professional dancer who does a stage dance, you'll work with a choreographer, who'll show you how the dance should be done. And you are supposed to trace the "original" and dance it.

You see dance audition (from classic "The chorus line" to recent reality shows), and they basically do the same.

Most dances and exercises are taught in this manner. You go to a dance class, and you move along the instructor for the (Zumba, salsa, cardio-whatever) class. For solo dances, you watch the instructor lift her right arm in a manner, then you do the same. You watch her step forward with right, you do the same.

This "tracing" is the most basic yet very tricky skill for dancing.

I wrote it simply, as if tracing were easy. Heck, no. Actually, very few people can do the tracing and do it well. 

In other words, only people who can do the tracing well can succeed in a professional dance circle, coming through auditions. It's a part of essential skills for professional dancers.


But I am not writing this entry to professionals. I am writing to people who want to learn from the scratch or to improve your current skill.

Tracing helps. The same tracing skill can be used for pretty much all kind of physical activities. Dance, martial arts, sports, acting, .....tracing is a very useful skill.

Note: tracing in a partner dancing adds another layer to the tracing. But having skills for simpler solo tracing helps, too.


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Step 1. Find the "original".

You want to trace something. Then find an "original" with high quality. Originals with video footage serve best. High quality originals include great dancers or athletes (e.g. Michael Jackson, Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali), or any other champions of the field of your choice.

I insist that you try to trace champions. It is not easy (or most likely impossible), but by trying, you'd appreciate their levels. 


You'd have your "original". Choose one to work on. Then, watch it carefully. 

When you watch a performance and get impressed, there is a reason. Try to describe the reason. "So smooth""So fast" "Very limber"."Perfectly synchronized""They are more committed in the moves""they move big""They are doing something I've never seen""They are so young!"....

There may be some reasons that you cannot trace. Probably you cannot be 5 years old again, or have limberness of a contortionist overnight. You can rate your possibility (or impossibility) of tracing. It's a part of appreciating the art, too.


You'd notice the "original" follow a certain rules. Be aware of it. Boxing follow the rules. Dancing, especially a partner dance, follow the rules (or basics for the dance) to some extent. If you are choosing a partner dance, you better know the rules.




For example, for exercise purpose, I tried to trace a classical boxing match "Sugar Ray Leonard vs Thomas Hearns 1 (1981)". You'd be surprised by the speed and slickness of their moves. You'd notice that you cannot move that fast if you are tense. You need to relax to move fast. Also, you might notice the flow of their motions. 

Only when you try to trace the original yourself, you'd appreciate it better, or notice more critical details. You need to pay serious attention to trace.

[Sugar Ray Leonard vs Thomas Hearns 1 (1981)]

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That's it for the first step. You find your high-quality "original" that you like, watch, verbalize the reason why you like it or what makes the performance outstanding, and attempt to trace. Also know the rules that are applied to the performance of the original.

In some later entries, I'd write other steps, including "map your body""install motion capture software""segment them" etc. 

Only when you know good performance, you can tell the difference between good performance and not-so-good performances. Finding good original is a part of educating yourself.

Science: Can colon cancer just fall off?

I picked up this paper in our Journal club on Friday 8/7/15.

"Apc restoration promotes cellular differentiation and reestablishes crypt homeostasis in colorectal cancer"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26091037


I don't write this blog for colon cancer specialists, researchers or graduate students, but to more general audience in mind. So, following is a little bit of background.


There is a  human genetic disease called Familial Ademonatous Polyposis, that produces numerous polyps and cancers in colon. A mutation in a gene called APC is the cause of the disease.

Apc mutations occur in 80-90% of human colon cancers, so Apc is considered a major tumor suppressor in colon cancer. In fact, apc protein interacts with over 100 other proteins and works as a major signaling hub in colon. So it makes sense if apc mutation can cause wreck havoc in the tissue regulations.

We knew transgenic apc mice develop intestinal polyps, and have used transgenic apc mice model to test/develop colon cancer prevention/therapy drugs for decades.


This paper uses new transgenic apc mice model (in which they can shut off/turn on apc expression in intestine with induction drug treatment) to prove that (i) apc shut-off leads to tissue dysplasia and intestinal cancer development, and (ii) apc turn-on led to re-differentiation of cancer and can restore normal intestinal tissues. (iii) They also tested to combine other mutations known to facilitate intestinal cancer development (i.e. p53 and k-ras). The double mutations led to more aggressive cancer development, but re-expressing apc could reverse the cancers as well.

There are more details interesting to us, but I'll save the details. This paper was published in journal Cell, which is considered as one of the most prestigious journals. So researchers in other field tend to treat papers in the journal with respect, and researchers in the same field reads them seriously. 


My impression was, "wow. that sounds too good to be true. What happened to current paradigm that cancer develop after acquiring many, like 20+ mutations? Can Apc restoration alone reverse them?"

Their conclusions suggest that reestablishing normal-functioning apc may be able to reverse cancers (with a reservation that their model probably do not reflect more advanced, stage 4 cancers that are most problematic clinically).  Although restoring apc in actual cancer without genetic tricks may be difficult in practice, the drastic effect of apc restoration was certainly impressive.

[Intestinal tissue dysplasia, adenoma and adenocarcinoma due to apc loss (and k-ras or p53mutation) can be reversed by reintroducing apc]

I write about this paper in this blog because of simplicity of their results, and of some thought-provoking aspects. For a few days, I find myself thinking about the results, trying to digest them and put them in place. 

Their cancer development model is along the line with contemporary cancer stem cell model. Apc loss can turn cells to somewhat stem cell-like cells, so they acquire ability to multiply outside of normal, differentiated state. The change is a strong driving force to form cancers.

There are many functions in the body that can work against cancer development, such as immune surveillance, cell death, differentiation and senescence. Their apc-loss model can override all these other factors, or so it seems. I wonder how the other "brakes" can (or cannot) be augmented to suppress cancers as well.