Pic of ballroom frame
Welcome to one of the most overlooked elements in beginner ballroom dancing - and one of the most important. Step on your partner’s feet a lot? Feel off balance frequently? Having trouble connecting with your partner, or feeling the lead or follow? You can blame most of that on a poor ballroom frame.
The ballroom frame has many definitions, but my favourite is one quoted teacher and friend, Arpad Raymond:
“A ballroom frame is the positioning of your arms and body that creates room for you to dance.”
Let’s take a more detailed look at how to maintain that space between ourselves and our partner.
With Open Arms
The two most common holds in ballroom or Latin dancing is the closed hold and the two-hand hold. I’ve thrown these pics up in a previous article, but here they are again:
Pics of closed and two-hand hold
Notice how the connected hands meet in the centre, in neutral territory. The arms round forward, like like they are about to hug each other. Also, the two-hand hold curves down to the waist, so that a marble rolling down your arm would stop at your wrist. A couple must never let the elbows go past the shoulder, or the hands past the elbows - this collapses the frame, and inevitably someone will miss the lead, or get stepped on.
In a ballroom dance (not Latin), the follower will be offset on the leader’s right, so her centre faces his shoulder. This allows you to step in between your partner’s feet, so you can dance more closely together.
Under Pressure
Imagine you are an olympic diver poised on the edge of the diving board: body straight and relaxed, weight poised on the balls of the feet, ready to spring into action.
When we connect with our partner, this forward incline creates a shape between you that looks like an upside down V.It also helps create a light but responsive pressure forward into your partner’s frame where your hands connect with your partner (in dance lingo, your ‘contact points’).
Since we always want to start our movements from our chest, pressing slightly into each other helps the leader send information more quickly to the follower, and they can more together as one unit.
Sweet Surrender
When in two-hand hold, small changes in how the arms are positioned can make a big difference. The leader will keep his elbows slightly outwards, as though they were resting on the arms of a chair. The follower will keep her elbows in-line with her wrist, which she can do by rotating her wrists so they face upwards, then rotating then back down but keeping the elbows in place. This helps creates a straight line of energy from the wrist to the shoulder, so she can respond more quickly to a lead.
A Final Word… About Feet
If there’s one thing I’ve seen literally trip up couples more than anything else, it’s focusing on where to put their feet instead of where to move their frame. Try it sometime: throw caution to the wind, trust your feet, and put all your attention on your frame, and moving your body with your partner. After a few repetition, your feet know their parts already - let them move on their own, and they won’t let you fall.
Looking good!
Well said !!!