Keeping your feet together, or not

Digging in the drafts file - I never got around to posting a small but interesting thing that happened in the walking class with Ezequiel and Geraldine Paludi.

Leaders were instructed to do a couple of walking steps, and then send the woman to their left in a somewhat open, diagonal backward step which was then followed by a turn. It wasn't complicated, but it immediately shook out an interesting technical issue.

In a lot of cases this setup didn't work. Geraldine called a halt and said that the reason it wasn't working was that most of the followers were trying much too hard to step in a straight line. She showed us again, emphasising that this was a backward-but-open step, and told us we were nearly all trying far too hard to keep our feet together.

Ezequiel then told the leaders not to contort themselves trying to walk to one side and the other of the woman. Instead they should walk in a straight line and move the woman from side to side.

This won't work, of course, unless you can trust the woman to move sideways when you lead her to do so. Now we understood what we were seeing and we tried it again.

My partner for the class observed that he hadn't actually been leading that. As soon as he did - quite easily, once it was pointed out - I did in fact automatically do the right thing, and based on other experience I thought I probably would have followed it correctly anyway even if I hadn't been forewarned. But it was difficult to know.

However, it did strike me as very important and something I should make a special effort to remember. Because trying too hard to snap your feet together and walk on rails, in defiance of what's actually being led, is a bad habit it would be very easy to get into, especially if you took a lot of classes. It's one of those rules-of-thumb that people tend to repeat a lot because it's very useful in its place (I've found it a big help in learning to keep my balance in turns). But the women students can easily give such things an importance they don't deserve, because in most beginner and intermediate classes we are pretty much having to scrabble about in the dirt for any tiny crumb of useful information addressed to us at all. So anything we do find can easily be elevated and overanalysed into an absolute rule. Of course that means you quickly collect a lot of conflicting rules. So those who don't give up in confused frustration very quickly work out that most of what they're hearing only applies provisionally and in context.

I also happen to think that when there is any information for us, it's harmful almost as often as it's helpful, and if you could measure it, it's quite possible you would find that the classes where the women are hardly spoken to at all are the ones which tend to produce better dancers. Certainly compared to the kind of class that adorns a pointless move with even more pointless ornaments. We just feel ripped off and neglected. Of course it could be self-selection, rather than cause and effect; those women who take complete responsibility for the quality of their own dancing are probably using the class as a practice session anyway, and might choose one that isn't going to patronise them with twiddles.

My partner tested the same movement in social dancing later and found that the other followers he danced with did not seem to know what to do with the same lead; it seemed to be a fairly common problem he had not been aware of.