Monday, November 28, 2011

Quest for the Unforced Heel Turn

Part: Follow
Dances: Nightclub 2-step, Waltz, Tango, Foxtrot, Viennese, Quickstep
Hovers: 0

Tuesday night we were joined for practice once again my our Latin dance friends, but they had their heads buried in some new routines they were trying to learn in a hurry, so it was funny to watch them both dancing around so focused on that little piece of paper. Good stuff. Jeff and I are fortunate in that we didn't really have much in the way of cramming to do, though I guess that was mainly by choice. I had a little catch up to do when I started dancing with Jeff, but it's much easier for a follow to catch on since technically I don't really have to remember the routines exactly.

After our requisite warm up dance, we danced our now usual round. This round was much longer than the one on Monday, but we felt it went pretty well. Jeff even commented that the tipsies are getting better. Ladies and gentlemen, this is HUGE. Nevertheless, I am aware that Jeff reading this will worry about me jinxing them, so let this be my official knock on wood. One consistent issue with our quickstep on the rounds is that we keep running out of space at the end of the long side on our second time through the routine. Since we're usually close to spent by the end of the round and things are close to falling apart, we often just let them and call it good since we "ran out of space" anyway. But sooner or later we'll need to figure out how to get out the jam, since comps won't give us the luxury of quitting because we're tired and out of room.

The focus of practice was the quickstep running right turn. For some reason I hadn't been nailing that heel turn and I keep sliding forward or missing the heel turn all together. To me, it feels like I am being led to pass my feet and that I'm not put in a position where I can get my heels together. After some practice, we did end up with a couple of beautiful ones. I was focusing on staying with Jeff on the shapes and not rushing anything, and I'm not sure what he was thinking about, but in the end I think it was helping. I'm still not sure it's 100% fixed, but I think progress was made. It just doesn't feel good to force a heel turn because I know one should be happening, yet feel that the heel turn action is pulling me away from my partner and the lead. We'll need to work more on quickstep, but slowly but surely we're getting more comfortable with some of the problem areas.

No comments:

Post a Comment