American ballroom and basic techniqueThis article first appeared on the Dance Forums message board on 2009.01.23. In my first competitive American style partnership - really the only one where I spent any appreciable amount of time on American - we took the normal approach to American Smooth. We had a lot of open choreography, which we practiced until we could do it in our sleep, refined until we could stay together from half way across the room, and polished until we were about as good as we were going to get. While we knew how to do basics and used them in social dancing, we found that our dance placements were directly related to how much open work we used; in competition, I think our waltz, which was our best dance competitively, had about one bar in closed dance position. A typical shot of one of the other 59 bars was something like this:  Now, while there are technical errors there, they aren't glaring, and that dancing was good enough to win pretty reliably east of the Mississippi, and place second at Nationals. However, I think it's instructive to take a closer look at the technical level of the dancing we were doing. To strip away the obscuring effect of open choreography, here's the one bar of closed dance position - as it turns out, an open right turn:  This picture really doesn't look so good. Not only does it have the "man pulling the lady over" look I remarked on upthread, it has a number of other faults: my arm line is limp, we have feet coming off the floor, and there's no shape or poise to speak of. Sure, the toes and heels were going down in the right order, but it's still not the kind of picture one would normally show people. As you can imagine, we did not get marked as well by the judge looking at us in this picture as by the judge in the first picture. The thing to realize, though, is that the level of technique is the same in both the pictures above; only the choreography is different. Really the judges should be marking both, or neither. By the time of these pictures, we had realized that our technique, or lack thereof, was limiting us. Unfortunately, it's not easy to find and fix technique problems in open material, because open material is designed to hide those problems - and no one was really interested in examining the basics of what was, by competition results, a championship level couple. We tried focusing on International style instead, but by that time it was really too late. Now, over the next decade, I eventually did manage to spend a couple of years focusing on my technique - building upward from the basics, on things like the effective use of pressure through the standing foot, clear arm lines, maybe a little on use of the sides of the body. I found working on technique every bit as enjoyable as refining choreography. And getting back to the open right turn, I think a more recent picture will show the difference:  Comparing this to the picture above, I'm no longer pulling the lady over by dropping my shoulders back, the arm line and hold are noticeably clearer, and the action of the feet is considerably cleaner. Obviously there's room for further improvement, but it's not as if the work on basic technique is wasted. Nor are the benefits limited to basic material, as illustrated by this comparison: 
Again, this is an open figure where the choreography hides a multitude of sins, and plenty of judges liked the version on the left just fine. If you look carefully, though, you can see that the technique differences in the open right turn are mirrored here in the standing spin: in the picture on the right, I'm not leaning back as much, my foot positions are cleaner, and the arm lines and body positioning are clearer. The payoff can be seen in the swoosh of the skirt, reflecting the fact that my rotation rate in the dancing on the right is about twice as fast as on the left. I really didn't work on the open figures at all in the interim; the only instruction I've ever had on the standing spin was part of a lecture with David Kloss and five minutes with Eddie Norman, years before any of these pictures. It was just improvements in basic technique - or rather in more advanced technique developed in basic figures. I really wish I'd done that work ten years earlier. I'm of the opinion that continued improvement in technique, even in basic figures, is not something that one ever finishes, and is something that can benefit dancers of any level. I think if we're going to get rid of the negative image many people have of American style, we need for top level pros to be willing to show their technique where it is obvious - in the basic figures - and for judges to be willing to mark it there. |