Edwin Li

Moving Smoothly Across The Floor

• Major Topics:
• Connecting to the ground: Using your legs, feet, and body weight to stay connected to the ground
• Moving across the ground: Transferring your weight smoothly while controlling your height. Falling and catching yourself just in time...continuously.

Dance is movement to music, and partner dancing is moving your body in coordination and concert with another person's body.  Before you can move well *with* someone, you must be able to move yourself well.  In this class, I'll provide principles of movement, ways to control and move your body, and then we'll bring it all within the context of West Coast Swing.  Accompanied and illustrated by exercises, drills, and applications to basics, we'll get at the hows and whys that allow us to think about our beloved WCS in a new light.

All Connection, All the Time

• Major Topics:
• Connecting to your partner: Minimum connection, tuning your springs, and using your high and low "centers".
• 100% Connection: Never allow slack. Feel each other every second of every dance.
• Tying your connection to your movement: Use your springs as sensors to coordinate your body tilt.

Once we've learned how to move ourselves well, we can learn how to better move *with* someone else. Connection is how we converse with each other as we dance in West Coast Swing. What is that conversation, and what are the rules of how it is spoken? What does it mean to move with someone in West Coast Swing, and how do we make that happen? This class will examine those questions and offer interpretations, possible answers, and how-tos. Through principles, exercises, and careful attention to our basics, we'll tune our bodies to connect with, feel, and use the energy we each have during the dance. Then...we juggle that energy and each other. :-)

Interpreting Music's Layers: Marrying movement to music

• Major Topics:
• Music as a layered collage of durations: How long does each sound in each layer last?
• Varying the duration of your weight changes: How long does a step take?
• Dancing across the layers: What layers do you want to express?

What differentiates "just" movement from movement to music? What is musicality? We'll break these questions down and offer a panoply of tools--ways of listening and moving--to allow ourselves to answer these questions. Drawing from both the Movement and Connection classes, this class will bring those tools and concepts to bear on musical interpretation. We will use them not only in exercises and patterns, but will examine how to break out of the pattern-box while staying true to the movement and connection that define WCS.

And in Conclusion: Jugglers, Springs, and Patterns, Oh My!! (title may vary)

• Major Topics:
• Summary class: A capstone class, providing a choreographed bit of WCS to illustrate the concepts from Movement, Connection, and Musical Interpretation classes.

Movement, Connection, and Music. Taken together, the previous classes have broken down WCS into some pretty small fragments, with hints about how they might fit together into a particular interpretation, dialect, or framework of WCS. This is the class where we put Humpty Dumpty back together and see what the egghead looks like. This class shows how it all fits together.

Always the last class in a series of classes, this class draws the concepts from the classes that precede it and teaches a piece of WCS choreographed to a particular piece of music. This approach provides attendees with the opportunity to apply the concepts from the other classes to more advanced patterns and to feel those concepts working in your body and your dancing.

Foundations for Advanced Footwork

• Major Topics:
• Freeing your feet: Go beyond walks and triples.
• Keeping WCS rythym: Protect your lead or following rhythm from your footwork.