Muscles, music and movement

Date: 16-04-2007 Posted by: Anabolic Info TeamUnited States

To the uninitiated, it didn't look like he was practicing for a bodybuilding competition.

Steven Dunning's initial run-through of his posing routine seemed, at first, more like an interpretive dance.

Of course, there was a reason for that. The 49-year-old furniture store owner from Manchester said as he prepares for his first bodybuilding competition April 28 in Burlington, he is using his training in ballet, among other activities, to plan out his poses.

"It's just natural for me to utilize things in my experience," Dunning said from the Rutland Tae Kwan Do studio where he takes ballet lessons. "In the routine, I use boxing moves because I'm a boxer. I'm using boxing as an underlying theme — I always come back to an uppercut or a cross-hook."

Dunning recently returned to ballet after a long hiatus. He started at the age of 20.

"I was in the theater, an acting company — summer theater," he said. "What I liked most of all was dance."

Dunning said going to graduate school for painting pulled him away for a long time, but couldn't keep him away forever.

"It was just a drive," he said. "I started with Ilene (Blackman) six months ago. It was something I had to do again. I can't explain it. It was something I needed to do."

Dunning said he also recently started working with nutritionist John Scaralia of Body Tech Nutrition in Rutland.

"I had a little more body fat than I wanted," he said. "I was at 12 percent and I wanted to get down to eight."

It was Scaralia, Dunning said, who suggested he take part in the bodybuilding competition.

"It was something completely foreign to me," Dunning said. "I said I could use that challenge."

Competitors are required to perform a series of eight specific poses while lined up together, and then do a personal routine for a minute and a half. For the routine, he said he selected a section of music from Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" for its passion and aggression.

Scaralia said many bodybuilders do not put so much thought into their routines.

"Some guys, they grab a piece of music the night before and say, 'What poses look good with this?'" he said.

Dunning demonstrated the first draft, so to speak, of the routine to Blackman and Scaralia on Tuesday, after Blackman's morning ballet class. It was a mixture of bodybuilder poses, boxing swings and footwork and ballet moves.

"Basically, it's there," he said. "The layout is there. It's pretty clear what I'm doing. … I need to get some poses in. I need to figure out which poses look good on me and the transition, but I know where they go."

Blackman, who was critiquing the performance with Scaralia, said there was an easy way to achieve that.

"You've got really strong music there," she said. "It's all pow, pow, pow. You've got to listen to that music. Your poses will come out of listening to that music."

Blackman said this was not the first time she had helped prepare a bodybuilding routine, and that it involved many of the same skills as ballet.

"It's performance," she said. "You're dealing with music. It's choreography. The similarities are not unusual. It's just the venue is different. … I even had a gentleman who was auditioning for the Chippendales ask me to critique his routine."

She also pointed out that she and Scaralia made many of the same comments.

"I was thinking of putting in a …" Dunning did a double-spin in lieu of finishing the sentence.

Scaralia said it was great.

"You'll have people standing up," he said. "The guys who always score best are always the dancers. They show everyone up."