UKSALSA CHAT | ON2 CHAT | SUZYQ CHAT 
Subject: leading and styling
From: andy
Date: Saturday 21st September 2002, 11:52 am

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Doesn't sound intentional to me, she probably didn't realise.
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Probably true.

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Sounds to me like you weren't getting ready for the lead in time.
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Maybe true. Women frequently get their timing wrong too.

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I need you to have made it clear you want my hand well before beat 1.
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You are right up to a point. However you should be dancing with your partner not with yourself. If your partner isn't good enough to get his hand offer in early enough you shouldn't (once you've worked out his level of dancing) be making life difficult for him intentionally. That's not what partner dancing is about.

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Anyway, I'm going to be styling by beat 1, so if you expect me to take your hand, you better get ready for me in plenty of time and then I'll take your hand and won't style with mine.
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And be very careful with that one too. A present trend in Salsa amongst many women is to overdo the styling and, in my opinion at least, if you are styling with your hands on every one count you are almost certainly overdoing it. It's supposed to be a social partner dance not a stage show. Heavy styling makes it look like a stage show and usually makes it feel (from the leads point of view) that he isn't actually dancing with someone as a partner but that he's dancing in front of a stage dancer who's largely doing her own thing.

Add to that the fact that very, very few women do styling well anyway and it's just a mess.

Don't get me wrong, some simple styling well done is good. But if you go beyond that into the "I've got a free hand I'm going to wiggle it" stuff that some teachers have made popular of late you're probably doing neither yourself nor your partners any favours.
 

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A load of the time, you men blame us for doing something wrong, when you could sort it out by improving your lead and timing a bit.
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That cuts both ways. In my experience (10 years of partner dancing) there are plenty of women who have basic technical faults in their dancing. That's excaberated in Salsa because virtually no teachers teach basic technique so many dancers never learn it.

   
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