UKSALSA CHAT | ON2 CHAT | SUZYQ CHAT 
Subject: leading and styling
From: laura (Laura Williams)
Date: Wednesday 25th September 2002, 10:00 am

 BEGIN QUOTE 
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.
 END QUOTE 

I don't delibarately avoid my partner's hand (except in situations where I feel that my partner is going to injure me). Usually though the man isn't consistently late, but is sometimes on time and sometimes late. So I can't tell the difference between a late offer of a hand and no offer of a hand until it's too late.

 BEGIN QUOTE 
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.
 END QUOTE 

Just because I'm styling frequently, doesn't mean it's heavy styling. Sometimes you would barely notice it. I'm not talking about stage show styling, just subtle movements in keeping with my dancing.

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

Styling is something which needs to be learned as much as any other part of dancing. It just takes time to get there. It's like learning the basic step. To begin with, you'll get the timing wrong and your steps will be the wrong size and your balance will be off. Nobody says very, very few men do the basic step well, so they should stop doing it, they give them the opportunity to improve. Same with styling. It's a mess at the moment, but that's because we're all still learning.

Like you said, it's a partner dance. I want to be able to express myself in the dance and not just be something for the men to drag around. You've got your moves to express yourself, I've got my styling to express myself. Too often the men don't want women to style because they feel the dance is all about doing moves and that by easing off the moves and giving us time to style they are somehow weakening their part of the dance.

   
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