Ballroom Blitz #034

Video

youtu.be/__UGl_1Cw9w

Transcript

Ian: Hey random dancer on the internet. My name's Ian,

Lindsey: and my name's Lindsey,

Ian & Lindsey: and this is a Ballroom Blitz.

Lindsey: Today dancers we're going to keep nice and toasty warm with a Jive move, it's called a Fallaway rock, you may know it as a basic or a closed basic it's where we tend to start when we first learn this dance. So, let's have a look.

[Demonstration without music]

Lindsey: This figure is following a pretty classic rhythm of a back-replace by both partners followed by two chasses. We want to keep it nice and tight, nice and light, because the Jive goes pretty fast.

The first job with most of our Jive moves is to get a little bit of tension going through our frame in this case it's a closed frame and that's what the back-replace is for. So, the leader is going backwards on the left foot, and then; it's called a back-replace if I back up here so you can see my feet...

...going backwards behind it there's a little bit of a turn here for the leader backwards onto the left foot, pressure through the ball of the foot first and then the heel lowers to the floor.

You can see what that's done to my forward foot, I actually lift that one up and then replace it right back to where it started making sure I get my weight on that second foot so I'm ready for my chassis on the left.

For the follower it's almost exactly the same we have a little bit more turn. So, if I'm facing my partner here when I do my back replace it again is going to sort of land just behind my other foot we don't want to actually take a backward step anyway we want this to be largely on the spot. I'm going to turn a quarter and my lead is going to help, so my first step which is on my right, I lift my knee and it will land there and I have turned a quarter. Again the ball of the foot hits the floor first, I then push my heel down with some control that pops my left foot up into the floor but I'm going to just replace it back to where it was with my weight on it ready for my chasse on my right.

So, if we start facing each other Ian's going to end up on an angle and I'm going to end up turning a quarter to face you guys.

So we have a:

[Demonstration of steps 1 & 2]

Lindsey: With most of our Jive we don't have that many slows we have Quicks and we have Quick-a-Quicks. These two are two quicks so we will have:

[Demonstration of steps 1 & 2 with counts]

Lindsey: After we've had that almost sort of a slight push away, and then sort of snapping back towards each other again creating that tension we're going to do something with that tension with our two chasses.

So, the leader will have a left-a-left followed by a right-a-right. Followers will have the opposite and what we're going to do is to square up with each other and take those chasses in a sideways direction first one way towards our hands, and then the other. So, if we do it from this angle you'll see us do our back-replace: then our first chasse is going to take us along the floor and our second one is going to take us back from whence we came.

[Demonstration with counts]

Lindsey: Hardly any of our drive moves are terribly big because they are fast but we do want to make sure that in this particular figure we do get that sideways movement with the chasses so we don't confuse them with any of our other figures that it might be.

Now, because the Jive is fast and because between those two chasses we're changing direction we want to make sure that we're doing this lightly but safely. So, we use pressure through our feet to help keep things nice and light but to be able to use the floor to help change direction and we want to make sure that we have nice soft knees. So, you'll feel the balls of your feet. The heels are touching the ground as well when they need to to help keep things nice and light but under your control.

[Demonstration with music]

Lindsey: And that's all there is to it. So the Fallaway rock is a great starting place. It's also a great move if you forget all other moves when you're out on the social floor. You're nicely in contact with your partner and you can repeat this move because it lands you exactly where you started. So use it as a base for either doing another one or launching into your other Jive moves. Have some fun, we'll see you next time.