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Showing posts from December, 2023

The preflight checklist part 1: pick and choose

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Something that a lot of people struggle with when dancing is, simply, applying what they’ve learned while actually dancing. It’s often easy enough to access a new skill in an isolated drill or during a practice with an instructor, to a very slow song or no music at all. But out in the wild on the social floor, or even during a practice wherein you’re actually improv dancing, things just… fall apart.  I think that this is largely thanks to trying to do too much. Maybe the 'too much' is simply in terms of information overload. Maybe it's too many differing and maybe diametrically opposed instructor points of view. Maybe it's highly qualified instructors giving tips that are more of a technical analysis than actionable cues, I talk about that a little bit  here. ----- The first antidote to trying to do too much  is... focusing more, on fewer things. As with many other aspects of how I think about west coast swing, the initial idea came from Fae Ashley. Essentially, she wou