"Anybody. Answer this. According to the Technique books, all of them. On a Forward Walk in the Standard Syle at the full extent of the stride as the front heel is on the floor and the ball of the rear foot is also on the floor. Exactly at this point where is the body."

While this is too subtle a point for some of the official references which come from an era of movements that were fairly small overall, the actual answer is "substantially closer to the front foot than to the rear foot".

This is true even in non-dance walking. But it needs to be even more true in partner dancing, for the simple reasons that there's a partner's body in front of you for an overextended leg to run into, and there isn't anything behind you in the space you just vacated.

One noted exception is in the geometry of tango walks and similar situations in other dances; there the movement for the front leg is not actually towards the partner's body but across it in front or behind, and thus the leg can be safely sent somewhat further in advanced of the body than in the more usual cases. However the body is still likely to be closer to the front foot than to the rear.

You will see some difference of degree between different dancers. Generally, those who are closest to their front foot can have the straightest lower backs while remaining in body contact or near contact. Conversely, those where the closeness of the body to the front foot is less pronounced tend to have some arch in their lower backs in order to keep their hips further from their partner's and thus create room for the front leg to be a bit further in front of their body.

You move from the CORE ( unless you,re a chicken ! )...and if anything precedes the core, its the knee ( very slightly ,as Gleave said )..

If I had coached my profs in the manner you described, they would never have gotten out of rising star category..

can anyone post a link showing a top professional dancing, say, a foxtrot feather step, with the moving foot moving no more than about 6 inches in front of the body?

Hi anonymous
Thanks for answering my posting. I was really trying to make headway on Cyd's original comments about the moving foot being no more than 4-6 inches in front of the body. Nobody seems to have contradicted this comment yet i do not see it in the teaching videos i have (made by ex-world champions). I see a body pretty well mid-way between the feet at, for example, the instant the right foot reaches its position for step 1 in the feather step.
Can i ask a follow-up question (at great risk because it will divert from the original point)?
When the moving foot is passing the standing foot, shouldn't they both be under the body?

You will see the property of the forward moving body being substantially closer to the front foot than the rear on videos of top dancers actually dancing. Related, on the initial heel lead steps you will see that the front knee doesn't tend to get nearly as straight at maximum extension as a lot of lesser dancers try to make it. The foot placement is much closer to being "under" the body (especially if you extend the inclined line of the torso to down to the floor) rather than having the sense of being out in front of it.

However, it's interesting to note a lot of the same dancers will sometimes show broken down figures using very different proportions and orders of movement than they do when they dance. But as their talk progresses and they get closer to a "full" solo or partnered demonstration, their mechanics and actions change back to what is required for sublime partner dancing. Presumably when they are doing otherwise they are exaggerating the moving leg usage to show direction of movement and stretch, rather than action and proportion.

Thanks for these responses.
Here are some examples (you will notice they are 'real' competitions)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD2Lj5noYhI&feature=related

At about 1 minute and 38 seconds, you will see a couple moving across the scene from the centre of the floor. But all through, on movements like feather steps and 3-steps, it's clear that the bodies are pretty well between the feet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23qwbFOVM1E&feature=related

Maybe it should 'feel like' the moving foot is no more than 6 inches in front of the body.

If anything, these videos support, rather than contradict my points.

They show a lot of examples of step one actions being onto a visibly bent knee, body closer to the front foot than the rear, such that the step is effectively contained within the movement of the body instead of reached out in front of it.

Similarly, they show step two actions where the moving leg is closely related to a line extended down the front of the torso to the floor.

But these examples are not, however 100% perfect - if you have a way to precisely pause the video, watch the couple in blue (we don't need to bring their names into this) at 0:24 in the Blackpool video where his right leg does go slightly too far out in advance on step one of a Natural, and see how it forces her out of position.

"To go from point A to point B. If we divide that by one million we will pass through every fraction of that million. At some point our weight will be equally divided between the front heel and the ball of the rear foot."

This is a meaningless argument without taking into account the rather complicated meaning of "weight" in a dynamic system, where smooth movement can easily involve periods where the total force is greater than or lesser than the equivalent of gravity acting on the body mass.

"The knee will not be bent."

This is the far more interesting failure of observation - the fact is, that for skilled dancers, the front leg is generally not straight at the extreme of a a fully lowered step-one action, because if it were it would stick out too far out in front of the body movement. Many lesser dancers do teach the idea that one should have it straight at mid-stride. But that's just not what you see the best doing, for the very good reason that putting a leg far out in front of your body movement is counterproductive to the joint goals of smooth movement and clean partnering. Instead, what you will see the best dancers doing is keeping their body noticeably closer to the front leg than the rear, with the obvious result that the front knee doesn't straighten as much as the rear one does.

It's very easy to mistake swinging the moving leg for generating body movement. Gaining skill as a dancer is largely about outgrowing limiting habits like that, and the more masterful dancers have refined this to a greater degree than the others.

"Or this. In the Foxtrot rise at the end of the step as in a Featherstep."

Don't make the mistake of taking that farther than the very specific and narrow meaning of "rise" to which it refers. Everyone can see that the body smoothly and continuously gains altitude up until about when the feet pass at the end of step two, then begins smoothly losing altitude thereafter and all the way through step 3. The "rise" and fall given in the book is only one component contributing to the more musically and physically important concept of a gentle and continuously connected flow of up and down.

Scrivener had a very set idea of the rising and lowering during the execution of a Feather step . His belief/theory was.. the lowering starts to commence right after the 1st Quick has been taken, thus promoting more forward flight.

And something else thats seldom discussed in these and similar type actions, is " body shift ".