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Originally Posted by jivecat  No, it's taken me longer - at least two years! |
I was very well taught at the start though so I learned how to follow straight away, it sounds from your account earlier on this thread as though you had a ton of your time wasted.
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Originally Posted by jivecat I can hardly drag my eyes away from her fabulous shoe collction |
Whisper it ...
I don't like the way Comme Il Fauts look. They just make me think
'Footballers Wives' - a show of high satiric genius that I could hardly bear to watch, so I just used to read the episode guides.
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Originally Posted by jivecat Surely not! What kind of ones scare you? Do you think that if you make yourself do them they would eventually begin to feel natural? |
Anything that requires too much sacrifice of balance or concentration. Depends who I'm dancing with, of course. They do get easier with practice but I don't force anything when I'm meant to be dancing socially. Partly because I hate it so much when leaders force things on me that they haven't mastered, so I feel it's only fair. Sometimes I should be a bit more adventurous though.
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Originally Posted by jivecat Do you think all this stuff can be learnt by osmosis from compulsive viewing of Jennifer Bratt clips? I wish. |
I don't think so - I just treat them as suggestions, I think we mostly have to work out for ourselves how they're done.
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Originally Posted by jivecat The free leg is something I'm just returning to. In my early lessons people seemed to go on about it quite a lot, but I can't recall it being mentioned for some time now. It surfaced as an issue because one of my regular leaders said that it was very difficult to get me to do a boleo (that's where the leg is relaxed and swings freely, yes? I never have go a grip of all the terms.) The classes I attend seem to have moved towards a focus on learning figures and I would rather have some pure technique included every time. |
Yes! Yes! This is much harder than people think it is and because dance teachers never know any anatomy, when you do get an explanation it usually makes no sense at all except in that teacher's imagination, and nearly always seems to conflicts with the last explanation you got from someoene else.
And once you get in this sort of class, if you're a reasonably good follower, everyone ignores you and you get no teaching at all. Really, we should be more demanding.
I had the same problem with boleos just recently, maybe for the same reason. If I tried to relax that leg, which is what they tell you to do, it just went all over the place or was resting on the ground so it couldn't be moved at all. Luckily I got a tutorial with an experienced teacher who was helping out in the class and although I didn't manage to make it work in that lesson, I did puzzle out why it was that it didn't work.
I was dropping the hip, because that was the only way I could see to 'relax' the leg. Eventually I realised that the hip and the leg are not the same thing - it's possible to lift the free hip - so that your pelvis feels sort of balanced -
without holding the thigh joint in a particular position. You only 'lift' the hip in the same way it lifts by itself if you stand with both feet flat on the floor, heels together, then lift one heel off the floor. Just like that. Then you figure out how to do that and relax the thigh joint. It's possible but it's not 'natural' unless you dance all the time, and it has to be habitual before the boleos will actually work.
I have been conscientiously practicing this on trains, and it's getting a bit better, but the chances are about 90% that
my explanation will be totally useless to
you.
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Originally Posted by jivecat Is there a Jennifer Bratt clip where she demonstrates this? |
No, but I think it's because it's practically impossible to see from a picture what it is you are supposed to do with that leg. It has to be explained in words, hence the problem.
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Originally Posted by jivecat I'm more worried about damaging my feet - I often gouge the skin across the front of my foot as I pass the other foot across even in moderate heels. |
I do that all the time. I think everybody does. I noticed that in fishnets I can get a proper gouge with skin coming up, without tearing the tights. It's a bugger in one pair of shoes that tie with a ribbon bow on the instep. Tie a double bow - do this and trip yourself up. Tie a single bow - do this and it comes undone. Tie double knot, single bow - it takes forever to get your shoes off.