What was the problem, again?

Part: Follow

Dances: Night club 2-step, Bolero, Waltz, Tango

Hovers: 2

Great practice last night! We ended up skipping on Monday because neither of us was feeling very well; something is going around. So last night we enetered practice fairly fresh, though Jeff had preceded it with a tough workout.

I think the practice program is part of why we felt so successful last night. But I am getting ahead of myself. First, we warmed up to some new songs Jeff had copied over to his laptop, Bolero in particular. I really want to learn Bolero now, because it seems to be a combination of my favorite Latin dance (Rumba) and Waltz, which is a favorite of mine in standard. It takes a lot of control though and strong knees. I like the way it flows and the music tends to be lovely. It seems to require a certain amount of power and floor pressure in the movement, and good connection. I think Jeff and I could do well if we worked on it.

So then it was on to our practice plan. Waltz was the order of the day, and specifically the fallaway-reverse-slip pivot section coming out of wing. This part is really tough, because it's the fallaway-reverse-slip-pivot into double reverse into another fallaway-reverse-slip-pivot, so lots of rotation, but the problem initially of getting into the right position for it out of the awkward wrong side business. Whenever we dance it, I have a really hard time getting just the right distance in my first steps so that I end up back in regular position for the fallaway...I either overshoot it or don't get far enough. Sometimes, in my concern to nail it right, I'm not quite in time with Jeff either and we bump around a bit and lose the connection. So I thought we needed to work on it.

Jeff took me into practice frame, and we danced through the section in question. We nailed it! I'm not sure why; he knows as well as I do that it never feels that smooth, so we both were pretty surprised. Of course, Jeff gave me a hard time about putting something down to work on that we're dancing just fine...but he knew as well as I did that this must have been a fluke. So we danced it again, and again, and again...still good. Huh? Once we got into full frame it was not quite as good, but still so much better than normal. Granted, I did try the figure a few times on my own warming up before practice and also I was thinking about isolating the rotation of my hips, shoulders, and foot, so maybe that made a difference. Either way, neither of us had made any major changes to anything and it was somehow going much smoother. We ended up dancing through the whole section, including the preceding contra check a bunch of times, and then decided to finish up with our lead and follow tango. Oh, and I also noticed that our hestitation at the end of that long side in waltz felt a lot better than normal too...often the balance is a little shaky, but my head and body shaping felt just right and we stayed together. Crazy, but I'll take it!

For tango we danced a bit of our routine, and then when I reminded Jeff that it was lead and follow he did some lovely T-A-N-G-O boxes and social style promenades, swivels, and rocks. And that concluded our practice. Not bad! If we didn't have the practice program, we might not have felt so good about our dancing, but since we knew what we wanted to work on and ended up dancing that section much better than normally, it felt like a very successfull practice.