Anonymous. If you were a judge and a couple were continuously dancing 3412 instead of 1234. Would you mark them down. If we are not counting how would we know. Have you noticed how a few judges tap there foot to the beat. If you did a Quarter Turn and a Progresive Chasse into a Lock Step and wanted to do a Natural figure .( a V Six would do ). How would you get back into rythm after the Lock Step. This is why I pose the question. Is it neccessary to change the timing, and if it is, how would you do that without being aware of the beats.

"Anonymous. If you were a judge and a couple were continuously dancing 3412 instead of 1234. Would you mark them down. If we are not counting how would we know."

By LISTENING to the music.

If you have to count in order to listen, then you are not yet very good at listening.

Counting can be a good way to start towards improving your ability to pay attention to the music, but it is an artifical relationship to it. It would be as if when listening to another person, you had to under your breath or even silently repeate each word before you could understand it.

When you get to the point where the music speaks directly to you, you will not need to count any more in order to be on time.

"If you did a Quarter Turn and a Progresive Chasse into a Lock Step and wanted to do a Natural figure .( a V Six would do ). How would you get back into rythm after the Lock Step."

By adjusting where I started the group in relation to the music. Or by extending something an extra two count. Simply replacing a single slow with a quick will do nothing but put the emphasis of all the steps exactly off. The two quick pairing of stress must be preserved, whears preserving the measure is important at the beginnings and ends of phrases, but not necessary at other times - indeed, in a quickstep or a tango dancing figures 3412 can impart a very nice sense of "not done yet" sustenence through a grouping. That should be used much more sparingly in the foxtrot though.


This is why I pose the question. Is it neccessary to change the timing, and if it is, how would you do that without being aware of the beats.

Anonymous. I was at a lecture given by Espen Salsberg He mentioned that early in his career he found it difficult dancing to bad music. So in his head he split the beats into halfs and counted four beats as Tic a tic a tic a tic a. Those were the words he used. Try that without counting.
Getting away from Latin. If you do not count the beats you will go off time or out of rhythm or both.
Just think about this one. You have said that you dance without music. So you start. What is running through your head. Are you just pacing it out. Or on a Feather Step are you saying to yourself S Q Q S. Of course you are.
In our studio every one is liable to have to count the class in and start them on time with the music. If they want to count in slows and quicks that's ok. The count in, is always in numbers.5 6 7 8 start. They must start in phrase with the music. Can't just start anywhere. It gets even harder sometimes when we are starting in the middle of a group. But we even have a ten year old who can handle it as well as these twelve year olds in the young peoples technique class. If you didn't count you wouldn't survive. I will add to this that in Modern this is an exceptional school. But any of the other schools in Latin I have not struck one when it gets to a higher teaching standard that does not concentrate on the counting as well as the steps. It could be because we have a style here where if you didn't count you wouldn't be able to dance in this style. There are a few dances where the lady has three steps and the man two. After this we have to be on the same beat and step. Failure to do this will result in the whole dance being danced on the wrong beat. Every couple are dancing the same timing.Some of the dances are 16 bar phrased and some 32. All are based on the Modern style. At the end of the phrasing the sequence must be finished ready to start again.I've put this in , it might be of some interest to some to know what goes on the other side of the dancing world.

"Anonymous. I was at a lecture given by Espen Salsberg He mentioned that early in his career he found it difficult dancing to bad music. So in his head he split the beats into halfs and counted four beats as Tic a tic a tic a tic a. Those were the words he used. Try that without counting."

Counting is indeed a usefull tool to use when you are confused.

But counting is an aritificial interefernce between you and the music. If the music speaks directly to you, you do not need to count and in fact counting would severly get in the way. On the other hand, if the music does not yet accurately speak to you, you need to count.

"If you do not count the beats you will go off time or out of rhythm or both."

On the contrary, that is what will happen to you if you rely on counting - and worse, you will not be musical.

I'll let you in on a little secret. The rest of the dance world considers ballroom dancers - even most of our champions - to be very stiff, artifical, and unmusical. And the reason why is because we don't let the music speak to us - we are so obsessed with technical perfection, counting the beats and breaking the movements down in equivelent ways, that we forget to actually listen to the shapes in the music.

"You have said that you dance without music."

No. You need to learn to read more carefully. I said that a good dancer does not need music, because good dancing can be it's own music.

"Or on a Feather Step are you saying to yourself S Q Q S. Of course you are."

Of course I'm NOT. If I were to do that, I would be thinking something related to foxtrot, such as "swing catch drift" or something like that. The numbers mean nothing in foxtrot music, it is the patterns of musical drive and drift, stress and release, which are important.

"In our studio every one is liable to have to count the class in and start them on time with the music."

A tool, but not an end goal. Yet like most ballroom people, you are too caught up in the exercises to understand where it is you are supposed to be going.

Yes, ballroom is more technically demanding than many other dances so you do need to put a lot of work into the exercises. But you will not be A DANCER until you can start letting go of the technique and just trusting your body and your ears, dancing and interpreting the music without thought. Not all the time of course - you will need to keep doing exercises physical and mental, but you are not dancing until you can safely let go of those concerns from time to time.

Anonymous. What exactly does swing catch drift mean, if it is not just another way of counting S Q Q. Do you really mean to say you would teach a class not to be aware of the beats. That there is not two beats for a slow and one for a quick. Why do you think on a DVD they call out the timing on everything they are teaching. Is that so it can be ignored. With you, you must turn the sound off. You don't need it whilst you are learning the steps.

"Anonymous. What exactly does swing catch drift mean, if it is not just another way of counting S Q Q."

It is not. It is one of many ideas people have put forward to try to match the nature of foxtrot action.

"Do you really mean to say you would teach a class not to be aware of the beats. That there is not two beats for a slow and one for a quick."

Well since there aren't to most people's understanding of what actually happens, I would probably avoid getting caught up in the useless detail of trying to explain where the steps fall relative to the beats for slows and quicks. If you want a numerical standard for foxtrot execution, hit your first quick on beat three and just feel the rest flowing with the music - pretty much anyone who is off time will get that wrong, so getting that right will get you most of the way in terms of the strict part. Whears trying to count through the rest of the slows and quicks as individual steps placed to beats will only kill you movement and make the dance very halting and jerky.

In trught, the number one reason why dancers go off time in foxtrot has nothing to do with counting, and everything to do with the fact that they don't have the strength and knowledge required to dance slowly enough to match the music. Once they build that capability, matching the music isn't hard - before the build it, it's impossible.

"Why do you think on a DVD they call out the timing on everything they are teaching."

Because they are TEACHING. To do that, you break things down and structuralize them. But when it comes time to dance, you DANCE with your mind eventully unclutered by all that artificial, mechanical approximation. Perhaps you aren't to the point yet where it is safe to trust yourself to do that. If that's the case, then PLEASE, KEEP COUNTING.

As for why to present the slows and quicks, because it's important to understanding the ultimately amounts of time required for a figure, even though they are not actually danced quite the way that this implies. It's important to know if you have SQQ or SQQQQQ or whatever to understand how everything will fit together, but you don't want to get caught up in the trap of worrying about where the boundary between the last quick and the first slow is - that will only get your into trouble and very awkward movement.

SQQQQQQ of course

Anonymous. How would you know where beat three is if you don't count. Without counting it could be beat one.
Explanation. Starting 1 2. gives us 3 on the 3rd beat.
Starting on 3 4. gives us a third beat on 1. Which is wrong!!!.
If in your head the beats aren't registering how would you know when to start.
Your paragraph three. strength to keep in time. Try doing the Reverse Turn correctly and your two quicks will be balanced. Do it with a left side lead you will be off balance.
I would ask anybody to try it that way. Are you falling backwards or not. Could you stop on the first quick if you had to. If you can't then you are not balanced.

"Anonymous. How would you know where beat three is if you don't count."

By feeling it.

"Without counting it could be beat one."

No, beat one feels different.

You really have no experience with music, do you? If you listen to a great jazz soloist, do you think they are counting the beats and remembering the changes, and knowing that because this is the 3rd beat of the 5th bar they should play in a certain key? No, they listen, and the music speaks directly to them. They participate in the music directly, without having to go through the extra stage of numbers and conceptual names.

As will a DANCER, only their body is their instrument.

But music students, like dance students often need to count as they first learn to figure things out.

"Your paragraph three. strength to keep in time. Try doing the Reverse Turn correctly and your two quicks will be balanced. Do it with a left side lead you will be off balance."

That's not where is strength is needed. The primary problem with foxtrot timing is rushing the slow, and the primary cause of that is not being strong enough to fully sustain the final quick. You can make the task simpler by not rising very much at all - but usually when people get ahead of the music, they rise more to try to slow down (making it waltz-like) and that just means they will have even more trouble with getting into the slow after that too early...

Anonymous. There is a positive rise at the end of step one on the Reverse in accordance with the correct technique. This where we do not want no foot rise, we want foot rise. For a brief moment the feet are apart on two toes as the weight is transfered perfectly balanced. If you were asked to take your left foot off the floor you should be able to staying perfectly balanced. Which as a test we do regulaly to make sure we dance from one foot to the other and not stay in the middle which causes a dancer to fall onto the next step.