So, back on the chain gang
Numbers-wise, the class seems to be doing very well, we had about 25 attendees, which is excellent considering it's in mid-summer. They're now also starting to structure it so that there's an explicit (simultaneous) beginner and improver class also. It's also good that the overall standard of dancer is, I think, pretty high - most of the people there are at least intermediate Jive dancers, for example. And yes, I know, "WCS is jive for good dancers" blah blah blah...
Anyway, so we did our first 10-beat movement today, woo.
- Leaders step back on 1, and 2, as normal to start
- Leaders turn right, followers turn left, and both do a triple-step / chasse in parallel (left-right-left for the leaders) on the 3-and-4
- Both pivot (anti-clockwise for the leaders, clockwise for the followers) with another triple (right & pivot-left-right for the leaders) on the 5-and-6
- Change both do a travelling step turn (clockwise for the leaders) back to face each other on the 7-and-8
- Finsh with a standard anchor step on the 9-and-10.
So it's a 10-beat movement with four triple steps, very exciting.
It worked fine in both the classes and the freestyles, so whilst it's a fairly long pattern, my gut feeling is that it's more-or-less a leadable one.
But my general question is, now that I've learnt lots of 6-beat moves, an 8-beat (whip and variations) and now a 10-beat move, how do the followers know which timing I'll be using? I mean, I used lots of different variations in the freestyles, and it worked fine there, but that's in the context of evertone having learnt the same movements. So do followers simply default to 6-beat timing unless led otherwise, or what?
The Tango section was, umm, interesting. They put a, hmmm, not quite sure how to describe it, but "boleo-like-back ocho" into the mix. Basically* it was simply a linear media luna (or, even more basically, a "grapevine"), but the lead into it was interesting, you did it from a forward walk, turning to the right then stepping back in parallel with the follower. It's an insane thing to to in a social dance - three steps back?!? - but I think there's an interesting move in there somewhere. The good thing about doing what is fundamentally a pattern-based class in AT is that it provides some ideas which you may not have thought of otherwise.
* Admittedly for a given value of "basic"
A very good class to come back to after a break.
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