Floortime

I've been dating dancers since 2011. And, accompanying that, practicing with romantic or at least non-platonic partners for the same length of time. It's only natural that we become interested in people who share our hobbies, passion projects, and way of life. It's also very natural to want to practice and get better with these same people. It just makes sense, right? You want to improve, you support their improvement, maybe you even live together.... And it doesn't have to be unhealthy. It can be constructive!  Twelve-ish years (more than eight of them, now, doing west coast swing) have included a fair share of ups and downs, healthy and unhealthy interactions with partners.  It's also included plenty of purely platonic practice partners, and range of different levels of success and productivity there, too.  Maybe due to this experience, and a lot of thought (and therapy, and discussion with uninvolved friends, and working with my own teachers and coaches) I've...

 Hey there! First off, if you're a new reader - welcome.  Here is a youtube playlist  of me teaching - mostly group lesson recaps but some other educational stuff as well. Follower technique, thoughts on emotional health while working on your dance, and solo practice advice, among other things.   This is my instagram Here's a bit about my education and influences in WCS If you want to get in touch with me, either IG or FB messenger works or you can send me an email: arisdemarco@gmail.com  Recently I went to two events, Desert City Swing (my old hometown event) and Swingtime (my new one, as it turns out). I loved the venue, the music and social dancing, and how efficiently all the comps were run. It really was a very well done event, my favorite of the few I've been to since before the break.  https://swingtimewcs.com/   At swingtime, I made finals in both allstar Jack & Jill and allstar strictly. They recalled 10 leaders from I think 28 or 29,...

I’ve been doing west coast swing for eight years. Other than about two months early in 2020, I haven’t stopped dancing at least a few times each week since June 2015. During that time, I’ve lived in three different cities, and tried to grow and give back to each of these local communities. I’ve learned from the very best in the world, traveled to learn and teach and practice, and spent some time on the competition floor, too. I’ve had plenty of ups and downs in my dance – in practice, in comps, in my partnerships, and just in raw skill development.   This is the longest I’ve done anything in my life without stopping or wavering. I didn’t start when I was a little kid or anything, but I did recently pass the 1/4 mark of my life… which was sobering. I turned 30 just about the same time that I’d been dancing for seven and a half years. My first novice final!  Here are some lessons that have been valuable to me. 1.         Don’t keep doing it if you hate ...

  Yeah, the title is a reference to supernatural  I started doing west coast swing in 2015. I'd done collegiate ballroom for about two years, and salsa/bachata for about the same amount of time. Neither very seriously!  At this point I'd also played violin for over a decade, done martial arts for about four years (both of those when I was much younger), soccer for a couple of seasons (during middle school) track and field for two years (high school), calisthenics on a regular basis since 2008, trained hardstyle (SFG/RKC) kettlebells since 2009, and done powerlifting-style barbell strength training since 2010. I also worked full time as a personal trainer/powerlifting team coach/kettlebell instructor and mentor to other certified instructors as my full time profession from 2014-2018.  Yes, all of this helped me a lot. Much more so than the limited dance experience I'd had . My very first west coast swing lesson was in Washington DC but I really started a few months la...

First, the mirror here is an analogy. Looking in a mirror while you're dancing isn't wrong, and it isn't even rude as long as your partner knows you're practicing and sees the dance as such. But it's inefficient and will throw your dancing off. It'll change where your head weight is, possibly affect where your frame is at, and you'll have to abandon it if you're spotting anyway. Plus, watching yourself *directly* flat from the side or front isn't as good as a slight angle. You can get this if you have full unbroken mirrors on two perpendicular walls, but it's still not as good as a video. Or a video of the mirrored dance space! So take videos.  Everyone hates seeing themselves dance , at first at least. There are exceptions, but I think they're too scarce to mention. Even most people who are really, really self obsessed have insecurities and are surprised when the way they look doesn't match the images in their head.  You can think of thi...

Approaching west coast swing as a human being, Episode I   A few years ago, I came across the idea of body neutrality . I worked in the fitness industry as a strength coach and became very familiar with how negative self-talk affected people. The desire to measure up to impossible, airbrushed standards on magazine covers, web pages and tv. One of the suggestions I received from some very, very intelligent coaches (and good people) was to supplant aesthetic goals with performance goals . Rather than getting validation from others complimenting your appearance or comparing yourself to someone on a movie screen, you’d focus your efforts on what your body could DO—be it powerlifting, a triathlon, yoga, rock climbing, or anything else. For women especially the sensation of being strong, physically capable, and literally taking up space was a drastic change and improvement from where they’d been. Here’s the problem. That approach was body positivity —like the ‘big is beautiful’ ...

 "You're not shifting your weight, that's the problem," my then-girlfriend Fae told me. I assured her that I was. All the pieces, after all, were in the right places (I thought) I was checking all the boxes that I had been coached to. I could even take away the other foot and balance, to me this was proof that I was 'completing' my weight shift and my body was ending up in the proper situation.  She was right, which isn't unusual. As it turns out, weight shifts for our dance involve  more than lining up the requisite pieces (not everyone does) and contracting the requisite muscles (fewer do this), more than momentary balance. And weight shifts are really important! How we move from one foot to another is... pretty much the most important thing we do, since the bottom line of what we're doing is just shifting from foot to foot while holding hands with another person.  One of the major elements I've spent the past two years really working on is just...

Once social dancing stopped (or we stopped social dancing, anyway) due to the virus, I took a break from dancing. I'd never really taken a break from dancing before, in 5 years of west coast swing--maybe a little over a week at the most. But I felt burned out, tired, and it seemed like as good a time as any to stop for a bit. I decided to wait until I really felt hungry for it to dance again. So I waited. And waited.... And I didn't miss it. Didn't miss the socials, didn't miss competing, didn't miss the lessons, didn't miss dancing, period. And I waited some more....  Then about a week ago it hit me all at once. I wanted to dance again! In fact, I wanted nothing else. I was watching videos constantly, reading old posts, looking at all my past lesson notes, and I wanted to talk about dance, too. Single spaced summary of training that got me into advanced. After that I stopped taking as many notes.  What I still didn't miss was the week t...

There's that saying, "there's no place to go after allstar." That's partly true. Allstar is where the west coast swing competitive divisions... stop. You either become a champion, you quit, or you stay an allstar. It's somewhat rare air. Simultaneously, there are at least a couple of individuals who have managed to compete in allstar within a year or two of starting their competitive career. Wcs is far too deep and complex a movement art to even approach mastering in that time period, so simply based on that I don't think we can view 'competing in allstar' as some sort of final end point. On a logistical level, anyone who can make finals in a medium-sized advanced division with some regularity, who competes enough in three years can make allstar. When looked at in this way, entry to the division isn't such a high bar in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, there are professional instructors of some repute and lifelong wcs devot...

West Coast Swing is an incredibly difficult dance to master. Just in terms of a functioning lead-follow partnership: being able to understand not just your own body's movement but another's as well, well enough to signal or read signals in a largely open and free-form framework of connection. Learning to function with the variety of different partners sprung from a non syllabus dance with many different schools of thought... it's staggering to comprehend what champion wcs dancers are capable of doing.  There are a lot of factors that affect each individual when it comes to how easily they pick up the dance, too. I'll try to explore and write about as many of them as possible in the future. But one of the ones always mentioned is "dance background". That is, having done other partner or solo dances before starting wcs grants you an enormous advantage.  A few times, someone has told me that "it's easy for you, you're talented" (because...

Just a few weeks back, I tore my right shoulder. Embarrassingly enough, it was while doing a basic stretch. I then decided to compete in my jack & jill the very next day... and I didn't final. This hurt me a lot more than the actual injury. Maybe it was that I'd simply grown accustomed to making finals regularly, or maybe it was my ego or some sense of entitlement that I should be able to final even while injured. Either way, it sucked. I've had a pretty broad range of experience with making--or not making--finals. In novice, with the exception of my very first competition I made finals every time until I pointed out; and quickly got used to it, getting a bad attitude and being bratty about not placing when I did final. In intermediate, I placed every time that I made finals... which was less than 1/3 of the times I competed. Not only was the record inconsistent but I had an unhealthily large ego and a lot of insecurity at the time. Then, in advanced I took my time; d...