Understanding The Technique

Now stand on the outside of the circle, feet together, with the toes of each foot touching the outside edge of the circle. Do the following:

• Put your weight on your LEFT foot.
• Keeping your RIGHT foot in contact with the circle, move it rightwards around the circle for 1/4 of a turn. (If your circle is too big, this will be difficult. Get a smaller circle.)
• Now stand with your weight BETWEEN both feet, equally distributed.

What do you notice?

1. Your toes are pointing inward toward your own center.
2. Your center is pointing in a direction that is 1/8 to the right of where your right foot is pointing, AND 1/8 to the left of where your left foot is pointing, i.e., half way between your two feet.
3. If you drew lines straight forward from the toes of each foot, they would intersect in the middle of the circle.

You are demonstrating turn BETWEEN, ON THE OUTSIDE OF TURN (for a Side step turning 1/4.)

Two important points:

1. What your body does to create turn between on the inside of turn, and turn between on the outside of turn is fundamentally different.
2. The path that the free foot takes as the body moves to create turn between is critical, but completely ignored by the description of the technique. (By the way, the path you just created is NOT the actual path used when turning Between in the context of a figure, but it does allow you to determine the finished position, the goal, if you will, of the step.)

I describe the body action used to create turn between on the inside of turn as OPENING THE HIPS.

I describe the body action used to create turn between on the outside of turn as CLOSING THE HIPS.

(The topic of OPENING and CLOSING the hips will be discussed in greater detail in another posting.)

The path that you created by keeping the moving foot in contact with the edge of the circle is an idealized path. It doesn’t ever occur in the actual execution of a figure. But it does tell us the final position we are seeking, and it demonstrates in a clear manner one possible path that maintains in a strict way the essence of INSIDE or OUTSIDE when turning BETWEEN. In practice the path you take to arrive at the foot position given in the technique will be determined by:

1. The current dance position
2. The previous step
3. The kind of step being taken
4. The amount of turn needed
5. The size of the step being taken
6. The dance position at the end of the step being taken

The combination of these elements will uniquely determine the path which you can your partner can take.

While this might seem like a lot, once you have mastered the body action for TURN BETWEEN for both INSIDE and OUTSIDE for the SIDE step remaining in Closed Position, the small differences needed to execute the other types of steps and amounts of rotation will be easy.

I do suggest that you practice using the maximum amount of turn (3/8) since most of the basic figures use this amount of turn.

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