Re: Pushing off from the heels?

On Jun 25, 12:17 am, avid_dan...@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

A downswing is not simply a fall or lowering, it is a specific type of
lowering in which energy from the lost altitude is coupled into travel
across the floor. Most newer dancers can't do this - they lower in
place, and only then start moving.

The only real reason one should/would change level is
to travel (no pirouettes in Standard/Smooth), so your
wording is just distinction without a difference.

The functional difference is that dropping in place and only then to
travel does not convert the energy you had in rise to movement - it
just throws it away and creates new energy from the muscles.

No. In tango, the limited cycle of compression comes about by
alternately being over the foot and not over it, while the body
altitude remains essentially constant. There is no swing or rise and
fall to speak of.

The way you dance. Not the way I and others do, because
of the need for body compression.

What you do not understand about tango is that the "compression" is
primarily horizontal, not vertical.

The hip gets forward a little later.

Your way. Not mine. And I'm clear about my preference.

Your preference is however based on your lack of experience.

The knee is not really bent at the lowest point - the reason it's the
lowest point of the swing cycle is that the body is in between the
feet here, with the legs at least somewhat extended (how far they can
extend depends on how much the dancer is moving).

I'd like to see you with straight standing leg at the
_lowest_ point of your travel. You must be quite a
contortionist or have telescopic legs.

Once again you failed to read what I said. The reason the lowest
point is the lowest is because the body is not over the foot, but
between the feet. To state i another way, the legs basically form a
triangle, the altitude of which is less than the length of its sides.
The standing leg generally will be straight at this point; how
straight the moving leg gets depends on the amount of travel relative
to the body altitude - most dancers now drop enough that they front
leg will not be fully straight, though it's an interesting question if
this is optimal.
Skilled dancers make use of the free ride from gravity in the swing
dances. For an inexperienced dancer, or someone simply preferring to
make smaller movements (expert on a social floor) there's no use for
the gravitational potential energy that would be released by a
downswing, so little swing is used and rise and fall would preferably
be quite a bit more muted than what it would be in competition. (The
exception would be overdoing rise and fall to communicate with a very
inexperienced partner).

Potential energy, by definition, is stored, not released.
One would only need to store as much energy as needed for
subsequent travel, so the amount of lowering is proportional
to the amount of travel. Simple as that.

Yes. The potentialy energy stored in rise is converted to kinetic
energy of travel during the fall.
And then back to potential energy during the next rise. But *only*
on swing paths of movemeng.

While you may develop body speed (kinetic energy) at the
lowering, I develop mostly body compression (potential
energy) which is released on the upswing.

You lack understanding of physics - you throw around the term
"potential energy"
but fail to realize that is it not possible to store energy in "body
compression"
because your body is not a spring over the period of time in
question.
In contrast, I store energy in gravitational potential, and in the
kinetic energy of movement.

You are mistaking the word performed by your muscles for the release
of stored energy...
but in actuality the only energy you are releasing is the chemical
potential energy derived form the food you ate.

Body compression/expansion is the natural and most efficient
way the human body moves (when done right). It's not brute
muscle power. It's part of the "elasticity" to which many
elude.

The body is not elastic over the periods of time and quantities of
energy in question.
Our language is full of words that might lead to such a misleading
conclusion, but it's physically
not true. In very fast, impulsive movements there may be enough
compliance to get some rebound,
(scatter chasses or jive maybe?) but not in things as slow and as
large as the fundamental movements of the travelling dances.

Your description of down-to-up movement would have one think
that a rigid body is desirable, which is not only inefficient
but also hard to control.

There is no such suggestion in my comments.

I used quotes, that you conveniently ignore.

If you want to disclaim the point you made, then you have no point...

Whenever the
body has _any_ motion, it goes through compression/expansion
(contraction/extension)

False characterization. Nothing is being compressed or expanded
against a compliance in most of our movements.

, so it is exceedingly good at
cycling through shortening and lengthening.

Yes, but this is not physical energy storage.

When the
contraction/extension is performed properly, below the level
of lactic acid build-up, there is no "wasting of energy" and
is actually very invigorating and highly enjoyable.

BZZZ. Wrong. Your muscles do not generate ATP when stretched.
They turn chemical energy into mechanical work, but they cannot
recreate
chemical energy when mechanical work is performed upon them. Not can
they store any signficant quantity of energy in mechanical compliance,
because
that is not a property they really have - they are not springs over
the magnitudes in question.

Perhaps you (have to) use brute muscle power to get your
upswing, but well-done upswings result from the timely
passing of the upper body weight over the standing leg
and the natural leg extension that results from that
motion.

Without a downswing generating the travel, there is nothing for this
to result from other than muscular action.

Seems that you agree that one should not carry any tilt
in the direction of travel to the low point. Hence, no
downward force nor possibility of "crushing" the partner.

The possibility is a result of accidentally getting it wrong -
something quite common in less experienced dancers.

You don't use the term downswing because you haven't learned to use
one to enhance your dancing.

No. I discounted such usage because it's just bad
(for me)

As I was saying, you haven't learned to use one to enhance your
dancing. Whatever you tried to do did not enhance your dancing, so
you don't use it, which is to say you haven't learned to use it to
advantage...

The legato
timing/character in Tango is similar to the general
timing in AS Bronze Foxtrot

No, it's not. I mean foxtrot music and tango music are both often
readily divisible into groups of four beats at a similar tempo... but
nobody presumes to claim they are similar. Same with the dances.
If yours are similar, that indicates you don't yet understand enough
to differentiate them.

You are probably assuming the Tango Slows
ought to be done with staccato timing (which can be
the case by choice), and consequently the body part
sequencing would then be different.

No, but a legato tango slow is still not the same thing as foxtrot.
The legato timing in Tango (the stalking steps) is
smooth.

Not smooth in the same way foxtrot is.

The picking up of the moving leg is an
artificial/artistic thing taught by some instructors
but not others and is a matter of personal choice.

If you want to invent your own private dance, that's your right. The
whole AT crowd would of course toss your idea of tango out the window
along with mine.
Note that tapping is an example of the kind of moving - foot emphasis
that we want to avoid. Driving alternate standing knees while keeping
the feet in place might be a better idea.

The tapping I mentioned in the exercise could be done by
anything, including just a finger. It's meant to show
the difference between _hearing_ the beat and being able
to _move_ to the beat, which a lot of instructors and
observers confuse.

Oh, I understand your point, but you miss mine - which is that right
off the bat even in your illustrative examples you are making the
almost universal mistake (I probably would as well) of putting the
focus of your thoughts in the kind of direction that causes
problematic dance habits. We so habitually think of movement as the
extremity that is moving, instead of what we need to do which is think
of the body moving away from the extremity being departed. If we feel
the rhythm in an extremity, we are going about backwards - one needs
to get in the habit of feeling it in the body instead.

If you want to define the end of a pattern as where it ends in the
syllabus book, then you can answer your own question about foot
position (for that figure) simply by looking up where the book says
the feet are at the end of the figure described in the book.

There's a lot of "artistic license" in this.

Indeed, but if we are no longer dancing the figures described in the
book, then why should we worry about the largely arbitrary points
which the book considers their beginning and end? Thus my point that
I recognize no delimiters in tango apart from the ones provided by the
music.

By failing to see the difference between the self-promoting big fish
in a small, local pond, and those who train the big fish on the global
scale.

The one who is always talking about "experts" is claiming
that the one who practically never accepts expertise by
advertised authority is being blinded by promotion? Let's
get real.

I'm saying that whatever alleged experts you might have tried
listening to in the past (and so formed a negative impression of the
habit) probably were not anything of the sort. Oh, they might be able
to prep couples for some fairly decent comp results, but they probably
do not stress the fundamentals of ballroom movement in the
unfortunately rather unique way that the actual top coaches do. It's
the difference between training optimized for early results, and
training built around the idea of gaining fundamental mastery, then
adapting that to an application such as dancing at a social or a
competition. The plain fact that you have never been exposed to the
kinds of useful information that truly top coaches have to offer is
quite obvious in your writing. (If you had been exposed but simply
rejected it, you'd be saying things like "well that foot usage was all
well and good in Moore's day but isn't really how we win competitions
today" - which is precisely the short-term-priorities misconception
that I've been pointing out is largely to blame for why you haven't
been hearing about these concepts from the more everyday coaches you
might have encountered)

It doesn't take competition, it takes a lifetime of experience. It
so happens that competitors (and more importantly, retired competitors
who go on to coach current ones) are the only substantial group of
people who can really afford to invest a professional lifetime in the
subject.

Here you go with your "experts" again.

Apparently you don't believe in the concept of expertise gained
through experience.

Except that is, for expertise gained in social dancing, but only when
it's gained by those pure enough to have never competed ;-)

The ultimate master of one's own body is oneself. Even
the ultimate "expert" couldn't figure out the nuances of
one's body.

As I was saying, you don't believe that others can help you and so
insist on re-inventing everything yourself.
Why do you persist in the false belief that top coaches do not social
dance?

Because I've been to enough ballroom events and watched.

We've obviously been going to rather different events. Just as we are
obviously talking about different categories of coaches.

For whatever reasons, many ballroom pros are less fluid at
social dancing than many avid social dancers. They often do
much fancier stuff, but it's done by pushing and pulling.

You've not been hanging around with very skilled ballroom people,
apparently

When you approach an idea with the presumption that it's something
artificial to make your life harder, there's essentially zero chance
of you ever understanding it accurately enough for it to make your
life easier.

What presumptions? I'm always looking for simple and
easy, which means filtering out artificial complexities.

And when presented with long proven ones, you reject them out of hand,
largely because you refuse to take the time to understand what is
actually being said.

I suspect that you are focused on the feet because your
personal experience/background/ability made you have
to work harder on the feet.

Specifically, I was exposed to the advantages in quality of movement,
partner comfort, and posture that can be achieved by fully utilizing
the feet. I was unusually lucky to get that from one of my first
coaches... and then heard very little about it again, until I started
working with some of the top coaches in the world, who were giving the
same footwork corrections to dancers of all levels. That's what I
mean about widely neglected essential skills.

A classically-trained dancer
may not have the same issues because they would already
have strong feet from years of training/practice.

The classically trained dancer's possibly stronger feet usually get
negated by their refusal to employ them in the ballroom manner.
Basically, they forget that they have heels.

Although you are quite right about the fact that the bulk
of instructors out there are not top-notch, you may miss
the fact that the instructor mix may actually reflect the
market demand of the dance population.

A market which is in no small degree shaped over the long term by the
nature of dance opportunities offered to the public.
What's the major difference between ballroom and the other partner
dances... is it the dancing? No, it's the nature of the businesses
that most prominently offer it to the public.

Few dancers really
have the desire to dance excellently (even if they dream of
doing so), or they would be in much better physical shape
than they are (including instructors that smoke like
chimneys) and would be seriously taking solo dance classes.

And a primary advantage of foot usage is that it does not require the
entire body to be in top athletic condition. Rolling through the feet
when used to accomplish the majority of travel is essentially the low-
impact approach to dance movement.

Which brings up a possible reason for preferring inefficient dancing -
maybe people want a workout?

Hence, instructors who don't use the feet effectively may
actually be better at teaching students who have weak feet,
since they'll teach things that compensate.

Yes... which is to say projecting your belly to cover the gap required
to provide space for swinging your leg too soon.

You are assuming that they don't... in actuality, many of the younger
male ones now work as dance hosts for a major part of their income,

Must be a thing in your local ballroom circle, not common
around the country.

Ding! That's my point - you haven't been exposed to ballroom dancers
who are actually good at it, because they are not widespread. Instead
they are mostly concentrated in just a few cities where there's enough
of them to start to get some community benefit.

scaling down competition movements rather than carrying things from
the feet, but that's one shared by most purely social dancers as well.
(what dance hosting does to the community dynamic is another subject)

Aren't you convoluting your own logic? The purely social
dancers are not learning competitive stuff, so they can't
be transposing some technique they never "learned."

No, they are learning competition style movement, just in watered and
scaled down form, because if you trace the genealogy of instruction
you find a competition coach in the family tree. What I've been
arguing all through this is that this is the wrong part of competition
knowledge to apply to social dancing - instead of using the
competition leg movements scaled down, social dancing is better done
with the ideal foot action as the dominant source of movement, and
little leg movement. Competitors not experienced enough to be making
use of their feet are just doing to pass on the leg movement part of
their knowledge, scaled down to provide the entirety of social travel.

As I've mentioned before, ballroom dancing is one of the few
partner dancing arena where competitors shun social dancing,
and I've heard plenty of coaches ingrain into their students
the idea that social dancing corrupts their technique (and
there is some truth to this, depending on one's goals).

Except that they are turning around and doing it anyway now, for
economic reasons.

Actually most can, once you remove the red herring of putting them
into unfamiliar physical situations - in other words, if you ask a
skilled lady to backlead from her accustomed side of the hold, she
will do fine

You can special case or make excuses all you want, but the
general case is that role switching doesn't just happen.

I'm not special casing, I'm pointing out the experimental error behind
your hypothesis.

You are confusing lack of familiarity with unused body positions for
lack of ability to lead or follow, which is not even remotely the same
thing.

very basic ingredient that requires fundamental adjustment is
that leader and follower timing of the music is different
(typically by the lead-follow reaction time).

No. There are many actions where the follower moves first.

More fundamentally though, you are seeing leading and following as a
call and response thing, it isn't - it's a much closer and more
continuous process - two people who choose to can trade off the task
of picking directions, elements, and timing quite invisibly.
Actually, with a skilled lady, it's sometimes fun to start following
her without telling her that's what you are doing - doesn't mean she
is consciously leading or in any way guilty of back leading, just that
a slight inevitable inflection can be enough to suggest what you both
do next, and that can come from her nearly as easily as from you.
.

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