New Dance: Time To Waltz
Jennifer Choo Sue Chin | January 12, 2015A HAPPY NEW YEAR to all of you following my blog! I hope 2015 will bring better health, peace, joy and luck to everyone so we could enjoy more dancing. Here’s my first choreography for 2015 – TIME TO WALTZ – it’s also the first time I’m trying out a partner mixer as I find these type of dances fun and interesting to be done during parties where dancers get to mingle and dance with each other, something for a change.
The dance is choreographed to Chayanne’s beautiful music Tiempo De Vals, which means Waltz Time or Time to Waltz. The tempo is Viennese waltz (170 BPM). [I trimmed the song to end at 3:10 as the tempo gets too fast after that, so please email me for the correct version of the music]. I’m always fascinated with Viennese waltz dancers twirling gracefully around the ballroom, and thought I should try to choreograph one with that concept. The steps are simple – with basic waltz steps – so dancers can concentrate more on the dynamics of changing partners instead.
The dance is a circle partner mixer line dance. That means, the steps are line dance steps, but done in a circle. You dance it with a partner and change partners after every vanilla sequence. The steps are generally the same with some variations partners A and B. Generally, A denotes the female partner as there are turning steps while B denotes the male partner. However, like many other partner mixer line dances, you don’t need to an opposite sex partner to dance with. 🙂
Shadow Position
A and B should be in the shadow position, with B being the ‘shadow’ (see diagram above). The right hands should be raised to the shoulder level while the left hands are held at waist level (not shown in diagram). In a circle, B’s position is at the inner circle while A’s position is at the outer circle. The dance is danced in the anticlockwise direction as the line of flow. That means, the dance is in the moving in the anticlockwise direction of the circle. This is how the circle might look like (see diagram below):
Circle Positions
I hope you will give this dance a try and do something different from the conventional 4 wall line dancing for a change. Here’s a video of me teaching it at Bandar Manjalara to Lily Soong’s wonderful students and at Jean Yeoh’s New Year charity dance gala at Bukit Mertajam. Have fun and lots of laughter!
