Ballroom Blitz #074

Video

youtu.be/--ZggWiOHbA

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!

Lindsey: Welcome back dancers, we have another Blitz for you. Today we're in the Jive world, and the move is Stop and Go.

[Demonstration without music]

Lindsey: So, as you can see it starts in an open position ends in an open position as well, and even though there is a bit of turn there for the follower we actually end up right back where we started.

Ian: Leads, we're going to start off with a pretty standard straight Back-Replace, as with any other open type figure. The first two steps of a link, nice and compact. Back-Replace. Now, what we're going to do is take a fairly standard Chasse forward, but as we do we're going to inspire the follow to turn and most of the time catch them before they pass us. There's, there's a lot of variation here, I'll let you explore that. The early one that I like to do is put out your jazz hand, give a bit of a visual signal to the follower, and then it's going to be ready to catch their back as you go. Footwork wise though, we're taking a simple forward-a-forward, but of course with that we're mixing our arm, inspiring up moving it towards our right shoulder to inspire the follow to turn and catching them with our right hand. So it would be more like a Back-Replace Quick-a-Quick, and here we're going to move forward. It's a slightly different type of Step-Replace. It's instead of a Back-Replace it's a Forward-Replace.

As you grow and get better with your Jive you can explore expanding this, I would recommend at the start keeping it nice and small simply a Forward-Replace, the follows are going Back-Replace there, so our frame is going to expand a little bit. But later on you can experiment with letting go and other things and really putting on a bit more of a show. But we're up to Back-Replace, in this case Forward-Replace, still with the right foot, we have Forward-Replace and we're just going to hit the rewind button. We're going back-a-back with the feet and really all we're going to do at that point, we've still got hold of the follow, we've sort of caught them with our right arm, we're still hoping that we've got a little bit of tension and hold through with this arm at least initially, we're going to extend forward a little bit of a rubber band stretch, replace to bring them back a little bit of encouragement with this hand hit the rewind button bring this arm up back-a-back and basically arrive back where you started.

Lindsey: So, as we said before, this one wants to start in an open position with your right hand holding the leaders left. As usual we're going to use our right foot for our Back-Replace and because it's in open it's just going straight back, not very far back, and then replace our weight onto our left. We're now ready for a Chasse to right and the lift of the leader's hand will make us turn about a half so that we're looking back where we came. We'll end up on the leader side, this is where our pattern changes instead of doing another Chasse we have got a Back and Replace, so that was my Left Foot. Right Foot, and then my Chasse on the left comes after that, that turns me back the other way. So a half turn to the left, I am back where we started.

So if we have a look at that from the top I've got Right, Left, Right-a-Right, Left, Right, Left-a-Left, and it's got a nice evenness to it.

So, if we have a look at all of that together, what you'll see from this angle is that sort of rubber band idea. At the far end that kind of slingshots us back to where we were. So we have a Back-Replace Chasse One, and Ian has caught me here. We've still got a step away from each other so I'm going to take a backward step that way Ian's going to take a forward step that way and this is the rubber band tension we're hoping for. Step and, we're sling shotted back.

From this angle you'll be able to see what Ian is doing with his hand. It's going to land sort of comfortably in my middle back there. We've got Back-Replace Chasse One, he catches me and sends me back.

[Demonstration with counts]

Lindsey: Now, as Ian said earlier that spare hand out of the leaders right at the beginning is a nice visual lead to let the followers know what's coming up but really the lead is that sort of catching and sending back so it is a physical lead as well as the bonus visual one.

[Demonstration with music]

Lindsey: And there you go the Stop and Go in the Jive. So, because it starts exactly where it finishes you can do multiple in a row. It's a nice one to sort of shake it up a little bit, changing that base pattern. But also, yeah, a good fun one to do: it's got some good energy to it. So, try it out on the floor, let us know what else you'd like to see and we'll catch you next time.