Chinese Cowboy Cha-cha

Part: Lead

Dance: Tango

Hovers: 1

I'm going to make up for my really long last two posts and write a short one tonight. It was a shorter practice, so it is entirely fair.

Tonight was tango, specifically our section with the fallaway promenades that do this kind of zig-zaggy thing across the short side of the floor. Jeff mostly wanted to figure out the alignment, so we worked on that and used our reference video to help figure it out. Alignment is really Jeff's department and frankly, I'd better not have anything to do with it. Especially given the recent conversations, my job when we're working on these sorts of issues is to follow only. That's fine by me since I never pay attention to alignments anyways; as a follow it doesn't affect me at all since the only alignment I care about is how I fit with the lead. For me it's completely relative. Jeff had this visualization of a reverse duck beak or some crazy thing, but since it didn't really apply to me I just focused on keeping my promenade position in good shape throughout the figures, and keeping my sides properly presented forwards and making my feet be patient and wait for him to go.

We did notice that we tend to bounce up a little and rise as we're doing the fallaways. When we think about it, we can keep it low and smoother, so right now we just need to be conscious of that until it's a habit. No bounce fallaways in tango!

I forgot to mention that before we started in on the tango, we convinced our two Latin dancer practice buddies to warm up to a Cowboy Cha-cha with us! You kind of have to know them to realize how funny that is, but it was great. Jeff loves that absurd dance for some inexplicable reason, but at least it got our practice started on a lighter note. You can't not laugh about dancing the Cowboy Cha-cha.

We finished up with a waltz run through with music, at my insistence. I couldn't believe we were going to end our practice session without dancing at least one dance to music, so I begged Jeff to let us just do one. It was in our practice program, after all. The waltz felt pretty good, actually, slow and controlled.

Practice ended with a quick jaunt to the store for ice cream. Jeff gets dangerously excited in the ice cream isle; I wouldn't want to send him there unattended. Now I love ice cream, but I don't whip out the gigantic tubs of fake vanilla Blue Bunny stuff and wave them at people, or audibly ponder the relative virtues of a plain Klondike bar versus Health flavored, or find the label of a frozen lemonade cup so intriguing. Then again, it was funny, and I did enjoy my little Hagen Daas rum raisin ice cream.