Dance Nerd
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”George E. P. Box
Long-form and technique-first, from someone who examines this for a living — and still finds it fun.
The end of one is not the end of a beat. A step ends when the free leg collects — which lands you past your point of balance and still moving, and makes the rise…
If you start your examinations at the moment you need them, you have started them too late. On the two camps who sit them, the pitfalls waiting for each, and what the process is…
Line of dance does two jobs at once — floorcraft on a crowded floor, and the vocabulary for which way a body points. A field guide, rebuilt with seven new diagrams.
All models are wrong. Some of them can dance. Two hands and the lower core — the wrong, useful model I hand people most often, and why it degrades so gracefully…
I asked ChatGPT to compare professions based on how much training time one puts in to each and this is what they came up with. That basically checks out with my own experience,…
The Viennese Waltz of Saturday night's Ohio Star Ball semi was our final dance as professional competitors. We decided that Ohio would be our final competition, but we wanted to…
I thought I'd put one place for everyone to take a look at all the Exam Prep livestreams I've been doing. So here goes… March 26 — Pamela Licht and Izabela Jaworska March 30 — Ron…
The forward swing Natural Turn from a stand still 1. Step 1 RF forward 1. Commence by elevating the center and turning the body against the desired direction: e.g. turning left in…
All learning is a process of self teaching to some degree. You can understand the instructions behind a certain technique, but to make it useful you need to figure out how much of…
One of my coaches recommended that I go through all the figures and write down what bits of technique are peculiar to those figures. So starting with some of the later figures…
There are a bunch of places in the ballroom technique where we step down on a toe or lower on a toe. This always befuddled me in years past. The normal footwork associated with a…
Why do they bother mentioning that we continue to turn? Let's look at where we can find mention of "continue to turn" 1. Natural Spin Turn for Man and Lady on 5 2. Outside Spin…
In Smooth one of the trickiest things to do is move from one open position to another, or even worse to a closed position. Often this is where there are breakdowns in a couple…
So...you may ask, "Why the heck do we need so many different types of whisk or double reverse spin?" These figures are there to breakdown two things. First, they give…
This may sound odd but we rarely do the same actions as our partners. One of the most difficult ideas to convey in partner dancing is that each dancer must control their own…
So...I'm going through all those places with Body turn as I prep for my Examiner's assessment. These are places where the body turns on top of the supporting leg without any turn…