Ballroom Blitz #038

Video

youtu.be/Pgo3JFFdaVc

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: Hello dancers today we are heading into the world of Samba and we've got one of the classic actions that Samba has it's a step called the Bota Fogo. Bit of a strange name; bit of an awesome move. Let's have a look.

The Bota Fogo action follows the same base rhythm as a our basic movement in the Samba. We've done a video on that so we'll put a link below. So, it's following a count of One-a-Two One-a-Two, and we'll either go Left-a-Left or Right-a-Right.

So we're going to look at the sort of classic base movement of this. You'll see that I'll shift forward slightly towards you as I go I'm going to start ready to go on my left foot and it's going to cross slightly across me in a contra position to begin, and then (so that's my one) "a" is my right foot coming out to the side. This is not really a step it's a sort of point out to the side I don't want to shift my weight over to it it's really there so that I can reposition my left foot onto a different angle on two. So if I take it back a little bit our count is One-a-Two.

If I go on my right foot same thing I'm going to cross over myself slightly in that contra way; One. My left foot now comes out to the side a-Two. So there's just enough pressure into the ball of my foot to allow my previous foot, my first foot, to be picked up and repositioned; so the repositioning of that foot is about a quarter. The important thing in a Bota Fogo is that where I land on one, that foot then doesn't move it's repositioning on the spot. It's not sliding towards me, it's not jumping away. So wherever I land is where I stay.

Now the timing of this is quite delicate with where we turn so we've got our one. When I poke my foot out to the side I still haven't turned myself yet. So I want to poke, and then turn on two; so it's a delayed movement. You'll also notice that my upper body is not moving nearly as much as my lower body, this is kind of a classic Latiny thing, where in order to emphasize the movement of the hips I'm keeping my upper body quite still. So if I'm looking at you guys there you'll notice that my lower half is doing much more than my upper half so we've got.

[Demonstration with counts]

[Demonstration with music]

Lindsey: And that is the basic Bota Fogo movement. We will do a bunch of different videos later down the track that shows you how you can put this together with your partner; there's all sorts of things that we can do: forward ones, backward ones, crisscross ones, contra ones, there is a whole host of ways that we can use this move. We'll also look a little bit deeper into where we can sort of put in that body tick that nice Samba movement in those other videos so watch out for those. Get onto that Samba floor have some fun it's the ultimate party dance so get into it.