Ballroom Blitz #045

Link in Jive - Jun 29, 2023

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.

Ian: Hello again Ballroom Blitzers, welcome back to the channel. Today we are going to be doing some Jive. A really easy and very useful figure known as the Link. Let's take a look.

[Demonstration without music]

Ian: So, hopefully from that demonstration you can see how easy this figure is. Following our regular back replace chasse chasse type pattern, and really really useful because the real whole purpose of it is to get us from our open position back to a closed position. So let's "link" those two positions together and get Jivin'.

So commencing in our open frame, so our closed frame is not quite there, it's an open frame. But, we want to get into a closed frame ready to do a figure that commences in closed frame. So, we're going to follow our Back-Replace-Chasse-Chasse pattern, as we've mentioned. And the beautiful thing about this figure is follows you're going to do the exact natural opposite and leads as long as your lead is reasonably strong and consistent then nothing really can go wrong. We're going to apply our regular Jive tension through our arms. We're not arm wrestling but we're going to make sure that our wall is presented here and we push off with our Back-Replace. Doing all the usual things to make sure we don't go skyrocketing backwards and throwing our weight around all those sorts of things. So we have our nice upright Back-Replace I'm going to invite the follow to Chasse forward slightly. I'm going to Chasse forward to them slightly, and as I do that I'm going to essentially put my hand in a closed position position. Chasse One. Achieve a closed position with the other hands as well, but now we can't just Chasse forward towards each other because will bash into each other, because we're in a closed position. But we've got another Chasse to burn so I'm going to Chasse to my right, the follows left, and we take a Chasse, and now we're ready on the regular starting foot for say a Fallaway Rock Fallaway Throwaway, all those fantastic things in closed. Link done.

[Demonstration with counts]

Ian: As with all of our Jive figures keep it nice and small keep it nice and light. Don't bounce up in the knees too much just keep it nice and compact.

[Demonstration with music]

Ian: Really that is all there is to the Link in Jive. It has a very singular purpose of linking a figure that has ended in the open position to a figure that should commence in the closed position. You will get variations later on where you can do different things with the Back-Replace portion, but we'll leave that for later and for you to explore. Really the guts of it is, don't try and make it more than it should be, get your arms into that position, close up the position, and do remember to put in that second Chasse. Sometimes we can get a little bit overwhelmed we do the back replace the first Chasse, yes we've hit closed position, and just forget to do the rest. Keep it calm, keep it simple, the same amount of steps as all our other basic type figures, and then go off into your closed position after that. Give it a try.