Reconquering the Quickstep

Part: Follow

Dances: Waltz, Foxtrot, Quickstep

Hovers: 2

Last night's practice was a bit shorter but also pretty efficient, as also this blog post will need to be. I did a kind of random workout on my own and then Jeff and I hit the weights for maybe 15 minutes before practice, and then got to work. After warming up to the "Proud to be an American" night club 2-step, we proceeded to dance through our waltz, and then did a little foxtrot. We mostly focused on quickstep though, as that by far is our dance that needs the most work. This time we focused particularly on the rumba cross section, and worked through it slowly and even pull out our old friend the slow metronome. Whenever it's up to me to pick a problem area in quickstep I always pick this piece, and Jeff always picks the tipsies...so this time we hit the part that I always feel is precarious. This time I focused on keeping my legs, hips, and shoulders each in their individual alignments with those elements of Jeff's frame, because sometimes I think that while one part of me is with him, the other part pulls away because of the speed and rotation and that starts to pull the whole thing apart. We also discovered that the principles we've been working on in foxtrot with regarding to not arching the back and maintaining lower connection are going to apply in most of the other dances, and it was true particularly in quickstep, and in this section because of the heavy rotation. Any gap can be disastrous when you're turning and moving that much.

Since our Latin dancer friends were practicing a Latin round, we ended up doing a rather slower quickstep to a jive and also a kind of syncopated one to a cha-cha. That was an interesting but a fun twist.

Tonight we plan to hit up quickstep again. As Jeff was saying last night, it's not a good sign when we both kind of dread dancing it and avoid it when we can. It's one of those things I think we sometimes feel guilty for not devoting more time to, yet always find some excuse to put off. We need to change that.