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+ View Older Messages

Re: Which syllabus does this site follow?
Posted by obsidian743
4/3/2013  7:00:00 PM
Awesome response and thank you! I agree that a component based approach is better and I could see how following this syllabus would be much easier to transition to another as opposed to vice a versa.

One more question, is BallroomDancers.com an association of sorts and if not, why not officially publish the syllabus under an association?
Re: Which syllabus does this site follow?
Posted by pakarinen
4/6/2013  7:42:00 AM
I'm a very linear thinker, so perhaps I pay too much attention to syllabi, but thank you for the comprehensive and well-written response!

I now know why I look at my DVIDA manuals and the videos here and sometimes wonder, "What the heck?" LOL!
Re: Which syllabus does this site follow?
Posted by nloftofan1
3/4/2014  8:05:00 AM
The "component-based" syllabus makes more sense than the alternative (and is more like the International syllabus). I'm not a pro, but a local pro with many years of teaching experience has begun to teach that way. His pitch is that he's trying to teach people to dance, not to memorize patterns.

I saw an example of what can (sort of) go wrong with the choreography-based approach recently. (The names of syllabus publishers and pros are left out to protect the guilty.) I wanted to "clean up" a Silver Cha-Cha pattern I had been taught, and was able to find a YouTube video of pros teaching that very pattern (a come-on to induce people to buy the complete instructional video). In my search I also found another video, made by the same company, of different pros teaching a pattern with the identical name but some major differences--possibly a newer version of the pattern. So which is the "right" one?

The moral of the story, as I see it, is that every dance figure was made up by somebody. So why not make up your own?
Re: Which syllabus does this site follow?
Posted by nloftofan1
3/8/2014  8:40:00 AM
We are saying the same thing. Yes, you should execute the elements correctly. But how they are put together in combinations is just somebody's suggested choreography. USISTD, DVIDA, Fred Astaire, and Arthur Murray (obviously I'm talking about American Style; in International Style the syllabus mostly consists of elements--a Three Step is just that, not a combination) may all have a Tango pattern that incorporates certain elements--possibly with some variation. Those patterns are close to one another but not identical. Is one more "right" than another? Possibly yes for a competition that requires a specific syllabus, but not in social dancing.
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