In a partnership with a classic height relationship the follower's elbows are often going to be slightly higher than her shoulders, which can create a graceful and feminine curve to her arm line (vs the man's straighter lines), but can be a position that it takes time to gain comfort with. Something that helps a lot is to place hands spread apart on something just above head height (a chin-up bar in a wide door frame for example) and then let the shoulders relax down - if someone is available to assist, placing the weight of their hands on your shoulders may help.

If the lady is close to the man's height (or taller), creating a graceful topline may be more challenging. It may be possible to compensate to some degree in the knees (beyond the ordinary degree of softness both partners need there) and you will see this in videos of professional couples with such a height relationship, but carrying too much knee bend through the entire dance is limiting and hard on the body. What is to be avoided is a sort of ripple to the lady's shoulder line - elbows down, shoulders up. Some gown necklines help with this visually, others highlight even the smallest problem.

Speaking more generally, many frame problems actually come from lower down. If the standing foot is not being used to send the body, and the body movement is not causing the moving foot to land in precisely the right place relative to the partner, stress will be introduced into the partnership, and that stress is likely to show up in a distorted frame. Learning to move ones body in a way that exactly matches a partner ends up being a huge asset to keeping a stable frame.

One of the things that I have discovered is that it is more than just relaxing the shoulders. There is a certain amount of lock down that happens in the back that gets them in proper position and keeps them there. The stronger those muscles become the easier holding it all in place gets.

My suggestion, as you relax the shoulders pay attention to the exchange in which muscles contract and which release. Then when you tense up immediately engage the right muscles and disengage the wrong muscles. It is something that you can actively set your brain to doing instead of trying to 'relax' when you aren't relaxed.

I have always thought the idea that you 'relax' anyhing when you are dancing is a little bit silly. Shoulders are part of your core...your core should be active, activate the muscles in your arms so you can create and finish beautiful lines.

That's a very interesting way of considering the body, extending the concept of the center of gravity up through the torso. It leaves the shoulders out of the equation, which is probably where they need to be.

I like silver's explanation that we must think of the arms as extensions of the lats and not the shoulders. Doing so allows the dancer to see the frame as an expression of the core and not as something to be trained separately.

jj

"I have always thought the idea that you 'relax' anyhing when you are dancing is a little bit silly. Shoulders are part of your core...your core should be active, activate the muscles in your arms so you can create and finish beautiful lines."

Activating the wrong muscles is as big a problem, and one that likely takes longer to fix, than not activating the right ones.

Training a body is not only about building strength, it's also about building finer-grained control - being able to employ one muscle without also engaging a nearby one that had always previously in life been activated together with it.

Another way of looking at this issue is to consider the opposite of 'relaxing' anything, but to have the correct muscle groups 'braced' for dancing.

Specifically, one effective way to get that space between the shoulders and the ears (I like that idea, and had not thought of it in those terms before) is to make sure that the head is properly erect, that the bracing through the legs and body, which we use in rise & fall all the time, extends through the neck (in particular), to properly support the head, so that we stand tall. The lady's backward poise calls for the head to be held in a particular way, and you should feel an elongation of the spine, up into the base of the skull, making sure that the chin is lifted away from the chest.

One secondary thought, tension in the shoulders is often the result of imperfect posture and defective hold. If the key body contact from hip to diaphram is not firm, then we compensate by the overuse of the arms to feel lead signals. Once sufficient muscle tone has been used to properly support the extended arms as part of the dance frame, the arms should feel light and relaxed. That has to include the shoulders too, so tension there may be as a result of inadequate contact in the lower body. You could try dancing some simple figures with no arm contact at all, and concentrate on lead and follow through the body alone. It's a very good exercise, anyway. Can your partner successfully turn you to PP and back, without any arm contact at all?

"Another way of looking at this issue is to consider the opposite of 'relaxing' anything, but to have the correct muscle groups 'braced' for dancing."

Bracing muscles during dancing is a very bad idea. The muscles that are activated must be activated in a soft and potentially yielding way.

"If the key body contact from hip to diaphram is not firm"

One would hope it would be light, not "firm" as the latter so often prompts inappropriately arching the lower back and is notorious in all but the most skilled for preventing the lady from achieving alignment over her standing foot.

"then we compensate by the overuse of the arms to feel lead signals."

The issue isn't so much the mechanics of communication, but developing an innate "awareness" of exactly where the partner's weight is and where it is going, that transcends the particular details of contact locations or senses used to achieve it.

"Once sufficient muscle tone has been used to properly support the extended arms as part of the dance frame, the arms should feel light and relaxed."

Exactly - not braced, but buoyant.

"That has to include the shoulders too, so tension there, may be as a result of inadequate contact in the lower body."

Not inadequate contact specifically, but inadequate awareness of the partner, leading to errors in matching of the partner's movement. Once weight goes onto feet that have been placed inconsistently, there's no solution.

"You could try dancing some simple figures with no arm contact at all, and concentrate on lead and follow through the body alone. It's a very good exercise, anyway. Can your partner successfully turn you to PP and back, without any arm contact at all?"

Smushing the bodies together is no more a solution than bracing the arms. What is required is to build an awareness of the partner's body irrespective of spacing, and match that in the projection of one's own body from one's standing foot, so that one's moving foot lands in a consistent position with that of the partner's.

There is no physical solution to insufficient awareness - only band-aids.

Am I meant to take the bait?

and warn her to ignore anymouse's self-important nonsense.

jj

Because my wife is taller than I, my shoulders almost always are set in a higher position than they would be if I were dancing with someone my height or shorter. So, it is easy for me to tell if there is too much tension in my shoulders -- they start to feel stiff.
Yoga is another good practice for relaxing parts of the body, and the shoulders being relaxed is a key to proper yoga as well.
I have enjoyed the tips and thoughts on this topic, as I consider it pretty important for a beginner to understand the difference between a proper frame with the head up and shoulders down vs. lifting everything up in an effort to "stand tall" -- yet look a little awkward.

Taiji is also a very good exercise regimen for dancers.

jj