Ballroom Blitz #080

Video

youtu.be/_K9VbXVHCZw

Transcript

Ian: Why hello there random dancer on the internet. My name's Ian,

Lindsey: and my name's Lindsey,

Ian & Lindsey: and this is a Ballroom Blitz!

Ian & Lindsey: Hello again Ballroom blitzers welcome back to the channel. Today we have a Halloween special, we're going to give you a two for one we're going to be doing those steps that make you feel

Argh!

It's Scary steps.

Natural Spin Turn

Ian: The first scary step we're going to be doing today, and we are going to be doing two, the first one is the Natural Spin Turn. Now, we've been sitting on this one for a little while we harked back on it with our very first pet peeve, the impatience pet peeve, with our reenactment during that video. We'll leave it in the description for you to go back and have a look at, and a little bit of a laugh at as well, we're going to be doing that. We've done most of the steps we've covered a range of natural turns including the Natural Pivot Turn in Quickstep, we're going to be leaning on that video quite a lot today, and we're going to be finishing that figure with a spin to create a Natural Spin Turn. It does make a lot of followers in particular go "Oh My God!" and it is the bane of a lot of dancers existence on the social floor. So, we're going to take out the scary of that today. We're going to get you dancing perfect Natural Spin Turns in a flash.

Now, to help us de-scary the Natural Spin Turn in either the Quickstep, which is what we'll be demonstrating it in today, or your Modern Waltz, I'm going to let you in on a kept secret, it's not a very well-kept secret, but you may not have heard of it. If you are going to do a pivot in a modern dance, 99% of the time, someone must exit that pivot walking forward. There are a few shapely examples where we might exit to the side, but it is a fantastic rule of thumb that you must exit walking forward. So what we're going to do is we're actually going to take all the stuff we did in our Natural Pivot Turn, again link in the description, for Quickstep and I'm going to walk my follow out into a toe spin, and that is the Natural Spin Turn. It doesn't actually have as much "spinning" as you might think. We're going to block the follow, pivot them until we want to dance forward, dance forward into a single spin, and then settle ready for the next steps after that that we're going to follow with. If you can take out this spinning notion of going round and round like the animated Tassie devil, you'll take all the scary out of your Natural Spin turn and it will be a lot more pleasurable to follow, and a lot more pleasurable to lead.

So leaders, I'm going to dance the first four steps of a Natural Pivot turn; which is all of them. So let's dance a Natural Pivot turn for Quickstep Slow Quick Quick Pivot I now stay nice and balanced, I've pivoted until basically I can see where I want to dance next, I'm going to walk into a spin. So I'm going to take a heel step forward not a terribly big one, this isn't a driving step, but it is a heel step forward, I'm walking into that I get my weight over the ball of my foot, I spin and then allow the follow to step forward a little bit, I invite them to prepare to drive on the next step, stepping back and to the side and Bob's your uncle Fanny's your aunt I've danced a Natural Spin Turn. Let's see that in action we have

[demonstration of leaders steps]

Ian: and I am ready to be driven back by my follower on my right foot to exit the figure or follow on with the next figure which classically is your Progressive Chasse but obviously not always.

Now even though you don't have a Natural Pivot Turn in Modern Waltz, the action for your Natural Spin Turn is exactly the same. You still want to pivot around and walk into a spin, we simply change the count and the rhythm for the first three steps from a Slow-Quick-Quick to a One-Two-Three, and then of course we have a Four-Five-Six at the end, which is equivalent to three slows in the Quickstep.

Lindsey: So followers, the leaders are driving forward into this figure but, three steps later, it's our turn to drive forward. So our first few steps are backwards on the left, side on the right, and close, for a Slow-Quick-Quick. We're really hoping that we have our balance here, because if we have our balance here the next is a walk in the park, quite literally a walk for me a walk for my leader. So I walk forward at them with a drive, they pivot it around, and then they walk at me. At this point we close our feet, and here's where the spin comes in. So if I do that again they've walked at me, spin on the toes, and then we can step out, hopefully with some gusto, again we're hoping that we have our balance here, that we've stayed nice and close in the frame and on the hip and we have supported each other's moves.

Now the reason the natural spin turn is often very scary or a point of frustration for a lot of dancers is they're trying to do it all themself. It really is a figure where we need to let our partner do their bits, we need to do our bits so that our partner can rest when it is our turn to work, and that way we are building a figure where we do our own work and we don't have to feel like we're doing it all ourself.

In Quickstep we have

[demonstration with counts]

[demonstration with music]

In modern Waltz we have

[demonstration with counts]

[demonstration with music]

Ian: One final note to anti-scary this step of course is to remember for the followers to brush over step five and into step six so that you don't trip up your partner and leaders once you have a command of this step and you have your balance you can close your feet there too to get you some extra twist without actually throwing your follower off balance. But for now, get in that pivot turn section, walk into the spin, step out, do your bits let your partner do theirs, and the Natural Spin Turn is no longer such a scary step.

Spiral Actions

Lindsey: Now the second kind of step that we promised you in our scary step Blitz today was called a Spiral, We often find that the moves where there's a fair amount of turn do tend to freak people out, they end up being a huge amount of fun though with just a couple of tricks to make you feel like you're the one in control, so let's have a look at this move called the Spiral.

So the spiral is an action that helps us, or that happens when we turn in a certain way, and it can be a turn to the right a turn to the left and it can be for either the leader or the follower. Don't be surprised if the followers get a few more of them though and the leader helps support the follower doing these turns.

You will find Spiral turns in some of your Latin dances you'll also find them in the New Vogues, and after a while they become a really lovely controlled way of turning, so it's a good thing to get a handle on.

Lindsey: A lot of the time when we do a turn in our ballroom dancing world if we take a step on the right foot that means that we are going to turn to the right, and if we take a step on the left foot we turn to the left, not so with the spirals. The way a spiral works is that if I take a step on my right foot, I'm not actually going to turn to the right I'm going to turn to the left, so just that notion can take a little bit of getting used to because we're used to going the other way about it. But what happens if I take a step moving my weight onto my right foot, and then I turn to the left it's this curious twist of my legs that happens as I go around. So if I do it this way so you can see what's happening, weight is on the right, turn to the left, and you can see that my free foot, my left leg, is kind of curling around my right now. To begin with, this looks like it is a bit of a twisted position, and that it might not be terribly balanced, not so. This is actually a really balanced position because I've got my legs very close to each other I can tense my thighs towards each other, and that actually gives me a really good base for some great stability.

Now that spiral action of the legs doesn't work if I try to bring my free leg with me and indeed try to sort of stir my myself around with the foot that I don't have my weight on. So say I've just taken a step on my left, if I think I'm going to turn to my right but I try to use my leg to turn me, that's not a spiral. I've turned in the correct direction, but I haven't achieved that spiral action. So, the idea is I want to leave my toe on the floor and roughly where it is. It can start to drag a little bit as I continue to turn, so it depends how far I want to turn, but it won't work if I actually use lift and take that foot with me into the turn. So a little bit of patience and trust that that is actually the position that we want to get into really helps this move.

Now if you're finding that you're losing your balance in your Spiral Turns, or indeed any of your turns, one of the things that you want to make sure of is that the rest of your body isn't knocking you off balance, and one of the best things that we can do is simply stand nice and upright, make sure our heads are over our shoulders, that we're not leaning forward, we're not leaning back, we're not trying to use the head or the shoulders to really wrench us around, that we're actually quite pulled up through the center of us. So, a spiral that I'm pulled up in will be a much more successful spiral than one that I am not doing that in.

Ian: Now leaders, your steps through a spiral are many and varied. If you are actually spiraling yourself, you're going to do everything that Lindsey just said. If you're leading your follower through a Spiral action, the the, basically it's as unique as the step itself. So we're going to have to look at individual spiral figures whether they be in parts of New Vogues or the Latins to actually drill down on that. But there are two sort of things that you can do that will remain constant to help free up the the follower and give them the best experience you can. The first thing, well actually both of them relate to what Lindsey just said about the follows balance or the spiralers balance, and not being wavered off course. The first way that we can do that is if you have hand contact, you can help lift this arm up to create a drawn up type of arrangement, with the body and with a flick of the hand around quite centrally over that shoulder and the leg that's being spiraled, then we don't pull the follow off course and we actually help keep them up. So we don't want to be moving this or having a big pot stirring sort of arm over the head. Of course, the second way to do that is just to, if the move allows, break contact and if the follow is quite good on their feet and you can rely on them doing a spiral not getting off balance out of time all those things, then you can lead the spiral in a particular situation let go let the follow actually do their spiral and collect them at the end, and then really the rest of it is all in the nuances of the individual steps themselves.

Lindsey: And that's how you do a spiral so give it a practice, doesn't take much room to practice and it's a good one to just work out where your weight needs to be, where your balance is, how it feels, how to step out of it, and you'll get the most out of it on your dance floor. So, have some fun with it.

Ian & Lindsey: And there you go two not so scary steps after all. So, practice the pivots and walking into your Spin Turns, stand nice and upright and don't push your partner over during the spirals, put it into your respective dancing and we will see you next time bye.