Exciting new beginner moves!

[Gadget]

Originally Posted by Graham

It's taken me a while to get round to putting together my thoughts on this. In my opinion, the most important requirements of the beginner moves should be as follows:

• They should be reasonably simple to teach and to learn
• They should be easy to lead
• They should not be too open to mistakes which cause either pain or inappropriate contact
• They should collectively incorporate a good set of building blocks for learning more complicated moves later

I agree with the last one, but the first three are all dependant on the teaching, the 'contortion' and the 'length' of the move:

A "move" is made up of several positions and the movement required to flow between them. The more the positions, the longer the move is to learn. The seperation of sequential positions can result in unusual contortions.

I think that you have to include in a "beginner" or "basic" set of moves some of the most common positions and some of the most common ways to move between them. In this, I think that the new changes to moves are all excelent {with exception of the 'slow comb' variation } in that they drop out some repeated positions and seldom used movements and introduce some different positions and movements that were normally used only in 'intermediate' routines.
This gives a much wider base of knowledge to build more complex moves on top of and gives the beginner student more of a 'leg up' into the intermediate level of class - less brain power should now be required to get the moves, so more can be devoted to technical, musical, leadable and stylish aspects of the dance.

As I said when the "warm-up" was introduced - there has to be complete teacher buy-in before the class will get any benifit from it. It is another of these "clapping" things that gets the class to bond and do something simple together. It emphisises the movement to the men. It has everyone on the same beat. It gives the teacher a chance to size-up the pupils infront of them.

The 'in-and-out' I have been trying to think on ways to disguise the dull tedious nature of - the best I have come up with so far is to do a coyish curtsey... anyone have any other suggestions? I do sometimes use it in freestyle as a buffer before drawing the hands up and over for a double-handed-traveling-return if I need to pad my moves to fit the music.

The main difference between a "ceroc spin" and a "lady spin" is that instead of cupping hand for a 'ball & socket' preperation, you block on the lady's wrist (hand transfer from left to right infront of you). I think that it is a good alteration (if a bit pompus naming it the "ceroc spin") and can save shoulders/knuckles/wrists of ladies.