Ballroom Blitz #057

Impetus Turns in Slow Foxtrot - Aug 10, 2023

Transcript

Ian: Hey random dancer from the inter-webs, my name's Ian,

Lindsey: and I'm Lindsey,

Ian & Lindsey: and this is a Ballroom Blitz.

Ian: Hello blitzers and welcome back to the channel. Today we are going to be doing Impetus Turns. We're going to have a focus on Foxtrot, but it is of course the same figure in Quickstep and Modern Waltz as well. If you did have the pleasure of our last Ballroom Blitz it was one of Lindsey's pet peeves; her first pet peeve the second one for the channel, where she did express some quite strong opinions on the incorrectness that we sometimes witness with the Impetus Turns. Leaders if you did walk away with that like John Wayne feeling like your balls had been put in a vice this hopefully will put a little bit of a soothing patch across those so that you can be performing your Impetus Turns a little bit better. So, without further ado let's get into Impetus Turns.

[Demonstration without music]

Ian: So, your impetus turn has three main steps and two major exits. Basically you have an Open Impetus and a Closed Impetus. Usually if you're dancing a Closed Impetus you don't have to say "Closed", we just call it an Impetus Turn. But, if you're dancing and Open Impetus, you should precede it with that "Open" term, and in this context that means you're going to end the figure in Promenade Position. So your standard Impetus turn or Closed Impetus turn maintains Closed Position, and you're going to stay in closed throughout the whole figure, and your Open Impetus ends in Promenade Position ready to do a prominent figure. Both of them have three main steps and it essentially is a heel turn for the leader. Now when leaders do Heel Turns, they are slightly different to a followers Heel Turn, and really for all intents and purposes and the focus of today, this is because you know when you are going to do a heel turn. You are leading the figure, you've chosen the figure, so you know ahead of time that you're going to step back and perform a heel turn. If you turn that around and you put the follow into a heel turn, all else being equal, they don't know that in that moment you are going to be leading a heel turn until they're basically in it. We're going to focus on this is the major point of difference and show you what a leader should be doing in their heel turn, as opposed to what a follower will be doing so you can get the best out of your Impetus Turns.

Ian: Pretty exclusively your impetus turn is always going to be a Natural figure a rightward turning or a clockwise turning figure. This means that the person going back, and in this case the leader will always be stepping for-, beg your pardon, stepping backward on their left foot, because the person stepping forward will be going forward on the right foot. So if we take a Foxtrot style setup where the preceding figure has ended us with open feet, leads you're going to be ready to be driven backwards commence backwards on your left and you're going to step into a heel turn. We take the drive portion, we absorb the power, we say thank you very much from our follower, as we commence to turn over this heel we close our feet together to turn on a spot. Now here's where the major difference comes between a leader's Heel Turn in an Impetus and a follows Heel Turn, is that generally speaking you're not going to get all the way around to where you need to just on your heel alone. Which means when you take the second step, the actual close and changing weight, you've got to transfer weight to the ball of your right foot to continue the turn before stepping out in step three; like so. We have one turn on the heel swap to the ball of the foot and then step out. This doesn't work if the feet aren't close together because you get a very Neil Armstrong on the Moon type weight shift because your feet are too far apart. That was really the crux of Lindsey's pet peeve and the easiest way to fix it is basically to bring your feet together and just know about that little weight transfer trick.

[Demonstration of leaders steps with counts]

Ian: So, that in a nutshell is the leader's portion of an impetus turn. There's a school of thought that you can take them the other way and the mechanics would be exactly the same. But pretty much all of them are going to turn to the right, so let's just keep the focus there for a moment. If you need to revise your Heel Turns in general we have already blitzed those we'll put a link in the description, and so with the exception of that transfer onto the ball of the foot to get you that little bit of extra turn. You're basically lead stepping back, doing a heel turn, and [then] leading the follow out. Retaining a Closed Position in the demonstrations before, but if you take that last step to a Promenade Position it will be an Open Impetus.

Lindsey: So, followers just before our Impetus Turn the leaders would have turned their back to line of dance, meaning that we have the forward step down the floor. So if this is my line of dance, my leader has turned around me we're still in a nice closed hold and I am stepping forward at them on my right foot. And because of the nature of the rhythm, or what my leader is guiding me to do, I know that that is a drive step. So I am driving forward on my right, now at this point I don't necessarily know that it is an Impetus Turn, this does not matter, what the leader does with their frame will soon make it clear to me and I'll have no choice but to sort of go round. So I drive, what I'll feel next is that I've got some "impetus" if you will, some momentum to keep on going, but I'll feel my leader stop on the spot and that will sort of turn me around. So my second step lands, but we've got some turn that just naturally occurs there as I'm sort of being brought around by my leader. Still nice and close on the hip, the right foot brushes underneath me as the turn continues and we step slightly forward and out, as our leader guides us to at the end there. If I do it the other way, forwards on the right, I drive on a slow, and then I've got a quick brush-quick.

[Demonstration of followers steps with counts]

Lindsey: Now, Ian's mentioned several times that you can have a Closed Impetus or an Open Impetus, it's really important followers that you don't guess which one it is and turn yourself to Promenade. You need to wait for the guidance of the leader's frame to let you know that it's an Open Impetus. If you feel nothing, but just a nice sort of sturdy supportive frame that isn't shifting you about; stay in closed keep your head to the left.

Ian: So, if we arrange ourselves with our open feet for our Foxtrot, Lindsey gives me a good power step, slow, I stop on the spot walk her around. And you notice we now keep that momentum going keep that impetus going down the floor but instead of a straight line two closed bodies, we are orbiting around each other in that heel turn for the lead. So once more with counts we have

[Demonstration of with counts]

[Demonstration of with music]

Ian: And that is it blitzing the Impetus Turns. demonstrated in [Slow] Foxtrot but basically the same for your Waltz and Quickstep, though we will do those at some stage in the future. Smash them in, make sure you bring your feet together, do those heel turns leaders, use that weight change ball of foot trick to stay on the spot and get around, put them into whatever dances you choose, and have fun on the floor. We will see you next time.