what significance does eye sight level have on head posture and balance in ballroom dancing.
I am tall (180 cms) and have the habit of looking down, which makes me have a bad head posture (chin not parallel to ground)
Also any tips in rectifying this problem.

Twinkletoes1978. Eye site level and that means looking to an horizon also is a must. We used to be taught to look at the part where the wall and the ceiling meet. Use your own discretion here in case of a very high wall. Check that your head is not even slightly side bent. The whole thing becomes more difficult if you are taller than your partner. Some look at the floor because they feel safer that way. Chin up, if anyone out there was in the British army they will have heard that a thousand times. Through this I never had that as a problem. Any tips on rectifiying this problem.Yes join the army. Seriously though check that you are standing upright and not bent forward your spine must feel as if it goes straight through you skull and up to the ceiling. Try standing against a door, everything touches. Walk away keeping that shape. Does it feel strange. Thats how it should be even when you are out shopping. Does bad posture affect balance. It goes without saying it does. What you may do is build your balance around a head that is in the wrong position.From there nothing is correct. The lady her head is with the right eye higher than the left acquired by stretching the sides and not bending the head over to the left. Some of us have at some time wondered why the technique manuals have not gone into this more than they have.If they had done can you imagine how thick the book would be. It would be thick as a few Gone with the Wind's. Keep that chin up and look to your left. If you can see your partner even out of the corner of your eye you are not looking left. If she can see you out of the corner of her eye she also is not looking left. Good luck

For me I don't really think of what my eyes are doing I have to think about contecting the back of my head at the base of my neck and then pulling the whole unit back so everything was aligned with my spine. When I started dancing I had the nasty habit of standing with my head jutting out in front of me a little bit. So lifting my eyes helped but didn't solve the whole problem.

Also, our heads weigh a lot and just having it be in the right place will correct a lot of problems you may be having. Good luck and don't give up.

Dancer . So I have been told. If we were hung up from a hook in our head to the ceiling, all our bones would hang down into the correct line. No longer would the the head be forward or the shoulders hunched. Our spine would be long and we would be looking straight ahead. Thats it.

I think that your eye position is paramount!. I cannot tell you how many times I have had a coach yell at me "look where you are going!"...

If you have ever been at comp, who attracts your attention? Not the one who has no foucs and eye contact is all over the place... It is the one with a direct focus and strong intention that you are drawn to.... It screams confidence

For dance posture, I also was taught to practice standing with my back against the wall and flatten out my spine, but I must admit that I do have an issue with this posture for normal everyday activities. The lumbar and cervical regions of the spine are meant to be curved and cannot be expected to be straight as a wall during everyday activities. You would be trying to flatten out the naturally occurring curved shape of the spine. I think the wall is more for making sure that the head is directly over the shoulders, which in turn are directly over the hips. Thats a good thing. But a completely straight spine just can't be good in my mind. I'm going to have further discussion with my AM instructors regarding this and I'll let you know what they say. Thanks.

IndySpinner. I think you were refering to the spine thing in modern. I hope you will follow this one up with some more information
In Latin you have no choice , man and lady must not have a curve in the spine. It can be taken out. Polatis has an excercise for that.That is getting the spine flat on the floor. Somebody else may know and add their bit to this that a curved spine over a period of time can affect other organs in the body. This is anybody, including people who will not dance a step in their life.

I just talked it over with the lead instructor at my AM. He said that although the spine has natural curves, the dancer must try to minimize the curvature of the spine for the correct dance posture. But a straight spine used for dance posture is not a posture you will carry all day long in your everyday activities. He said for one thing we would look funny. He agreed that there is a certain curve that exists naturally in the spine and a person would not want to try to "minimize" it all day long. So, the statement "Try standing against a door, everything touches. Walk away keeping that shape. Does it feel strange. Thats how it should be even when you are out shopping" applies for vertical alignment of all body components, but does not mean trying to straighten out the spine all day long. In a nutshell, good posture does not mean a straight spine, it means good stacking of all your body components vertically while maintaining properly curvature where its supposed to exist, in the lumbar and cervical regions.

IndySpinner. It is age plus lack of the correct exercise or maybe something to do with the type of work we are doing that gives us bad posture. Most little children stand straight. If you had one that slouched about like most of us adults do you'd be rushing them to the doctors. Steven Hillier once said in a lecture here. That as a youngster he was always being told to hold the head up. But it wasn't his head it was his middle that was wrong. He went on to say that we have three blocks of wood one on top of the other below our ribs. The thought is to keep them in line all the time. Another approach to this problem is by Slavik who says on his disk that we stretch the base of the spine to the floor and the top to the ceiling and maintain that posture.

This is a good analogy Quickstep. The stretching of the spine is fundamental to good Yoga AND Yoga has helped me with my posture for dance. There are exercises that do just what Slavik said AND you visualise the bottom of your spine going in the opposite direction to the top of your spine giving you a nice stretch along the entire spine.