My first REAL dance step!

After having skipped a week (for that family trip) I really wanted to show Will some significant improvement. Our lessons have taken on a fairly standard routine - I tell him what's working and what's not. He asks me to demonstrate the stuff that's working, which I promptly mess up about 50% of the time. Then we go to the stuff that's NOT working. He deconstructs the problem, I try it a few times until I get it, then he adds a new skill. Not a bad rhythm, really. He's really good at deconstructing problems and I almost always understand it right away. Actually DOING it right may take a few times, but I academically understand what the change needs to be from his explanation.

Today it was that demon forward crossover problem - it's like my feet are too big and there's just not enough room for them to pass each other! I keep either catching a toe pick (they were invented by Satan himself) or lose my balance completely. Now from my "mental rehearsal" I realized that I needed to sort of "fall" onto the outside leg when you bring it in - in other words, lean in and trust that the skate will keep it's traction on the ice. OK - that helped a little, but there was still something wrong.

Will spotted it at once, of course. I was trying really hard to keep my hips square, sort of facing a tangent of the circle. That's very "ballet" thinking, and has gotten me into trouble before. This time, I needed to let the hips open up to face the center of the circle - low and behold, that suddenly gives your feet more room to work and voila! problem solved.

I ran into this same problem with one of the new things he threw at me today - skating on one foot in arabesque. I kept spiraling around - could keep the damn thing going straight forward (no snide comments, please). Turns out, it's that damn hip placement thing again. In ballet, you keep your hips square to the front and parallel to the floor as much as you can. In skating, you HAVE to open up your hip a little as you reach back with the free leg - that takes the pressure off your standing leg and you can hold it straight. Duh. I need to try hip placement as my first solution to problems from now on....

The exciting news today is that Will taught me my first real dance step!!!!! It's a chasse, which is both dance and skating is a connecting step that shows up all over the place. You practice this in a circle (I spend a LOT of time skating in circles right now) and the one time I actually did it right today it felt like I was actually DANCING for the first time! I can't wait to work on this when I get to the rink Monday morning!!!

.... oh, and I didn't step onto the ice with my friggin' blade guards on.