Your response reminded me of a friend..

Many,many moons ago, i had a friend who disappeared for about 18 months.. he suddenly was back on the " floor " .. I proceeded to ask him what he had been doing, and he replied " Ive been working with (very famous coach ).. " so i asked " on what ? ".. his response.. " A Feather and 3 step "..

A little extreme , but a point well made..

I first want to thank all those who answered. I did leave the question vague for a reason. I wanted an honest answer and a wild range answer first.

Bottom line answer to my first question: yes, if you are willing to put in the effect you can achieve a form of bronze, silver and gold within a couple of years. But to really achieve in those areas from the discussion I get that several things need to be in place.

One: you need a willing teacher to correct and supervisor your training. Which seems harder than I first thought.

Two: Serious commitment to practicing the correct form.

Three: Muscle memory takes time since practice and correct form are important.
Time is needed to smooth this area out and can be dangerous if you go to fast and learn the wrong thing.

Now several have stated and some might have even been a little offended by this topic. We all hopefully understand that the over all art form of dancing will not happen within 2 years. There is so much to learn and honestly, I was thinking of just American Style not all style in general. Since each Style "Basic" is different in general because of the geological location they come from.

But thank you all for responding to my first question and I did get the answer I was looking for. Please look for other question that I will post and I appreciate all your help.

Telemark. On your posting 8.12.09. you wrote that Gold is not in any sense an advanced level of dancing. So you are refering to today in the UK. If you took a gold medal at the time i did mine you wouldn't be saying that. This is long before the medals were sub divided into silver and then silver bar and so on. Even the medal itself a Bronze was made of Bronze. A Silver and the Gold were plated and bore a hallmark. All three were hand engraved with your name and date. Somewhere along the line the standard dropped in your country. It has here also . But that is not necessarily everywhere. Maybe this is why so many central Europeans as well as Asians are claiming the top spots in dancing today. I would have liked to see you taking a medal any level where the examiner was Len Scrivener.

Perhaps a higher standard obtains elsewhere, but I only comment on the situation that I see here.

The medal test system has become a money-maker for dance teachers, and the societies to which they subscribe, and there can be no really legitimate reason to offer a series of tests in twenty steps, except a commercial one. In the context of that series, we have to assume that the very highest is, in every sense, an advanced level of dancing, and that the bottom level (Bronze) is not. Gold is just two off the bottom, with seventeen more to go. In that sense, there can be no serious claim that Gold is "Advanced", unless we have a vocabulary of superlatives that can adequately distinguish progress through seventeen more levels.

More significantly, I have gone to the trouble of quoting extracts from the level descriptors used in the Syllabus to describe certain attributes, obviously desirable in an advanced level dancer, that are only required or expected at much higher levels.

Don't shoot the messenger because you don't like the message. Not unless you can show him to be in error, by reasoned argument.

Telemark. Do i understand you correctly that you have seventeen other levels above Gold, which is two from the bottom. If that is so, how things have changed in 50 years. Once there was Bronze Silver and Gold I believe there was a Gold Bar. I never met anyone who had a Gold Bar at that time. Just about everyone competing seriously had at some time passed their Gold Level.
It would seem by the way you have written that to be a Gold Medalist today where you live is something just past a beginner. In fact a bit of a joke. Maybe it is just the district you live in. I will add this. The Gold routines that my granddaughter is taking is not for the faint hearted. It is very difficult and requires a lot of training over a lot of months.

Yes, that is right.

But "Where I live" isn't some backwater or third world country (oops, I forgot, yes it is, but that's another topic), but the UK, home of Ballroom dancing, and home to the biggest and most important dance teaching societies in the world. The particular syllabus I have referred to is that of the IDTA, whose activities are international in reach and influence.

Actually, I wouldn't say that a test candidate of a creditable Gold standard today is any sort of joke: just that the standard required is modest, and quite readily attainable in quite a short period by anyone with an aptitude for dancing and with decent instruction.

Telemark. Wouldn't you say that the syllabus put out by the IDTA . That all of those figures are being used by todays competitors as part of there routine. If you think that the UK is the centre of our dance world you had better look at the list put out by the IDSF and reported on Dancesport UK on the 15th of April 2009. One Million Chinese. UK is way down the list. Canada comes second.
If you look at a Professional Foxtrot Final. You will see a Feather. Reverse Turn . Three Step, Feather Step into a Wave starting on side one through two into side three. Absolute Basic movements.

What is this supposed to mean? What was the question?



What?



Did I say that? When?

BTW, I can't count, having checked the IDTA Syllabus again, I count 26 levels of amateur awards, not 20:

Social Dance Award
One Dance Test
Bronze
Silver
Gold
Gold Bar
2nd Gold Bar
3rd Gold Bar
IDTA Star 1
IDTA Star 2
IDTA Star 3
IDTA Star 4
IDTA Star 5
President's Award 1
President's Award 2
President's Award 3
President's Award 4
International Award 1
International Award 2
International Award 3
International Award 4
International Supreme Award 1
International Supreme Award 2
International Supreme Award 3
International Supreme Award 4
International Supreme Certificate

Telemark. If anyone were to say to me the home of Ballroom Dancing. I would interpret that as being the centre of.
All of those grades of medals is nothing short of ridiculous. Also i think you may have been watching too many Demonstrations. In a competition they dont do one half of what they do in a Demonstration.
The other question. Which variation, which is part of the lower grade medal sylibus, are not being used in a competition. A Whisk and a Chasse is a variation as is a Double Reverse Spin and a Open Telemark.Plus anything else you can think of. You will see them being used all the time. Even in that final riduculous International Supreme Certificate,

Please yourself. I wrote what I wrote, and you have not shown me to be wrong.



I think I would agree. Is this my fault? I have been consistently challenged in maintaining that reaching "Gold" cannot be considered "advanced" in the context of such a series. No one has come up with any rational argument to refute that suggestion, but continue to imply that somehow it's MY fault.



Why? I don't understand what you are saying. Is your objection that the average competitor attempts an incredibly limited, but advanced, range of figures in a robotic way, and doesn't get placed, or that the very best competitive dancers can dance a Bronze syllabus routine superbly well, and win? We choose which figures to learn, and which to use in our dancing for ourselves. Some practise their art on the competition floor - and while dancesport is of no interest to me whatever, good luck to them - and others dance on the social floor, and look for their marks of "achievement" in the examination room. You pays your money and takes your choice. Yours and mine might be different: neither can claim to be right, just on the basis of the choice we have made.

As it happens, the only amateur medal I hold is in Silver Ballroom, because I became a student teacher, and the focus of my continued study changed. There are the Professional Performance Awards too, but I don't have anything to prove: anyone who watches me dance, will (if they know what they are doing) know within ten seconds, by observation, whether I can dance or not, and they are entitled to form their opinion (and I'm sure they do), but I didn't ask.



The other question is a redundant one: there is no answer.



I think that dancers who had worked their way through the medal test series and who had actually attained the International Supreme Certificate would be rather offended by your view. Particularly as their dancing would probably be really rather good - dare I say "Advanced"?

I've contributed all that I am going to to this topic, so if you have anything further to add, then someone else will have to reply if they wish to.