User of the Month: Navy Encinias, Flamenco Dancer
☀️ Navy Encinias
🕺🏽 Flamenco Dancer
🌵 Albuquerque, New Mexico
With an intense schedule of up to four to five performances a week, Navy Encinias eats, sleeps, and breathes flamenco dancing. Read on to learn more about how our September User of the Month uses yoga and meditation as a way to hone his strength and focus for performance.
When did you start flamenco dancing?
I started dancing very young because my family is full of dancers. My grandmother started a large nonprofit organization here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to promote flamenco, so I grew up around a lot of really traditional Spanish dance and Spanish artists. My father is a professional dancer and he started his own company in the late 90s. I started dancing for him professionally when I was about 14 years old, and I grew up training to be a professional performer.
when did you start practicing yoga?
I started practicing yoga in local studios when I was about 15 or 16 years old. I was looking for a space that was kind of my own, where I could train my body and study my body and learn about movement that wasn't for dance, wasn't for show. I think I really fell in love with the practice and it's been a part of my life ever since. It's a real anchor in my life. And I think when you work as a performer, whether as a dancer or a performer of any kind, a meditation practice really is beneficial. You learn so much about your mental tendencies through meditation.
how do you use alo moves?
I use Alo Moves all over the place. Because I work as a dancer, I'm in the studio almost the entire day. So if I'm in the studio alone, either before or after a rehearsal or a class, I'm able to start using it immediately wherever I am. I travel to perform in a lot of different cities, so I'm able to get off the train or get out of the car and be in the theater and, like, even just on the side of the stage, start practicing.
I have a super busy schedule. Because I work in a company, I rehearse with the company and I also have to practice or rehearse on my own. I perform sometimes up to six nights a week. It's almost impossible to coordinate my schedule with a studio schedule, so Alo Moves is taking that problem away entirely. I practice with Alo Moves every day. I've really looped it into what I do and part of my general body preparation training regimen.
how does yoga and meditation help you become a better performer?
As a performer, it's been incredibly beneficial for me to have meditation and also yoga as a part of how I prepare myself to perform so often and keep myself mentally ready all the time. It helps, especially with something like flamenco, which is such a tight and bound dance. It helps practicing something like yoga where you're able to reach into your range of motion and find fuller mobility and flexibility and just keep yourself balanced physically in that sense.
In order to perform, you have to be so present with people…nonverbal communication and communicating through your body, through your presence, through your attention, and through the music is really what flamenco is. I think that practice came from when I was very young, just from being around the music and learning to perform in that way. Something like yoga is so similar because it's really learning what your habits are in terms of “how do I interact with the present moment,” "how is my body in this position,” “where does my mind go doing this thing?” And just learning how to make change in that place, clean up your awareness, your attention, your ability to stay present.
It's from my yoga practice that I've developed this skill and I just take it right to the stage. In this very intense 15-minute performance of a solo or something, I am so much more mentally clear, so much more mentally present, and it gives me access to my physicality that I wouldn't have otherwise if I were not practicing something like yogic meditation, that type of work, that type of journey inward.
how does yoga help you respond to the intensity of flamenco performance?
When you pick a career in something that requires resilience, it's this ongoing and every day re-encounter with your limits, with your thresholds, with your own identity. So much is in crisis all the time because there's days that your practice, what you love to do, is deeply challenging to you. Even if it's what you love and it's something that you've been told that you're good at and that you should be doing, there's days when it's such a deep challenge to do even what you love to do.
As a flamenco dancer, you learn how to basically ride the wave of this very wild, very intense thing. What that takes physically is a lot of very controlled strength. In order to basically use your own feet as instruments, you have to be incredibly strong in order to hit the floor in a way that makes any sense. You have to have an incredible amount of precision, a ton of endurance, stamina, but also finesse. Something that is, at the end of the day, still artistic and beautiful.
I have found that in both yoga and my flamenco practice as a performer, just the practice of resilience through two things alongside each other is really what keeps me in balance. I have these side-by-side, ongoing conversations with myself about who I am as a resilient person, as a resilient body, as a strong body, as a strong performer, as a practitioner — someone who's committed to practice and to putting time in and to growing over time. I find that that's the work of both yoga and my work as a dancer.
Check out Navy’s favorite classes on Alo Moves here.