I am excited. I am worn out. My back hurts, my arms ache. My hips  feel weird. I am trying to breathe with my back. This is challenging stuff that requires hours of patient practise and analysis. For months and months – if not years.

It is a lovely sunny day out there in Hove and while the world is on the beach or outside busy bars, I am sweating away by myself in my front room.

Why?

Because some wise words that have been repeated over the years have finally, finally sunk in. As a leader the embrace is pretty damn important – and I have put mine under the microscope and found it sadly lacking.

I recently started using videos of myself dancing – which has been wonderful – and now I have taken that concept one more dangerous idea further forwards and started to freeze the frames.

Oh dear – so that is what I actually am doing, that noisy, constricting rubbish is what I am giving to the follower to express herself within. She absolutely should fire me.

And so here is one such frame, from a social dance with a talented  follower – I am just so ashamed. The video as a whole looks fine , but break it down, freeze it, and this is the rubbish I am actually giving her to work with :

 

She is looking beautiful in that dance not because of me, not supported by me – but because she is talented. There is simply nothing to say about my posture in this frozen frame that is anything other than a complete condemnation :

• Head forwards
• Hunched shoulders
• Waving hand
• Open Hand
• Weight all over the place
• Elbows not in front giving her no space
• Shoulders Tilted… I could go on….

So I have been ignoring the rare sunny day out there, I have been sweating, everything is screaming – but I have been trying to create something like this:

 

Two inches taller, hips slightly back into a true neutral, frame solid and quiet, chest up and expansive and forwards – head brought forwards only by the inflation of the embrace and still out of the way. Everything offered to the follower as her complete prerogative to how she would like to use it.

Maybe its easier when its raining outside?

Don’t be silly – this stuff is never going to be easy. But I am quietly optimistic – I have great teachers and maybe with their help I can destroy and rebuild so that I can go forwards on the kind of solid foundation that followers might enjoy – it is all about them, and the music – maybe a few more months and I can at least stop holding them back and allow them to express their beauty and individually in this wonderful dance.