Cross Pollination

I’ve written often about dance stylings and individual expression. It's a favorite topic. Gary and I have been encouraged by our clave/salsa instructor Shayne to make up our own. Our ballroom instructor Melissa gives us styling options, or sometimes we create a move together, which we call The Dance Lab. :-)

All of this has come fairly easy for us, especially within our swing dances. That makes sense, because swing (of all varieties) and salsa too are considered “street” dances in that they are supposed to be somewhat wild and free.

But what about other dances? Say, the rumba?

The rumba Gary and I had always considered more “formal”, and as such we hadn’t messed around with it too much. But lately we’ve been prodding and poking the rumba too. I guess it was just a matter of time. That’s what we do.

All in all we've discovered that 1) the human body can only move so many ways and so “creating” steps is probably discovering what others have, and 2) most steps can be taken from other dances and mixed in, although we do keep some steps for certain dances

Here’s what we’ve done so far. We made up a move we call The Vulcan; Gary acts like he pushes me down by the shoulder (I actually just go down on one leg…it’s all effect). We do this out of a WCS move called The Surprise (I turn backwards on the last half of the basic). The Vulcan translates really well into the rumba, as do a couple of clave stylings which we also added.

The rumba is becoming “ours.” Now for the foxtrot…