Once we started moving down the floor more, getting dizzy was no longer a problem.
Unfortunately, that's anecdotal. Improving your technique came with time, but during that same time period you were also slowly conditioning yourself to the rotation. So how do you know whether it was the technique or the conditioning that truly made the difference?
Learning how to travel, swing, move "through" instead of "around" one's partner -- all of these are fantastic techniques which do indeed improve one's ability to comfortably dance a Viennese Waltz. But they do not make you feel any less dizzy that you would otherwise. In the end, no matter what the quality of movement, you have still danced 1 full turn over the course of 6 beats (2 seconds). That's the reality, and you can't change that fact by increasing your progression.
For the sake of argument, let's take away all of the extraneous factors and just use solo spinning (eg Chaine turns) as an example. Compare the following two circumstances: (1) Dance 10 compact Chaine turns in a row -- 20 steps -- covering a total of about 5 feet of space, to the count of 1&2&3&4&, etc. (2) Now dance 10 solo ballroom pivots in a row -- 20 steps -- covering the entire length of the ballroom, to the same counts. In the second exercise, you may have traveled 5 times as far in the same amount of time, but do you actually feel any less dizzy?
Note that the average person, even a skilled dancer, will tend to feel at least some dizziness after doing 10 chaine turns in a row. This is true even with perfect "spotting". Spotting is a technique which does actually reduce dizziness, but only to a very limited extent. By holding your focus in one place for half of the turn, you offset the timing of the rotation of your head (the part that actually gets dizzy). In the end, you have still rotated the same amount whether or not you spot, but by spotting, you've reduced the constant and continuous quality of the rotation. This can help, but again, only to a limited extent.
In Viennese, no such technique exists. You can't spot in closed position. Your head remains fixed, and so the rotation of the head is as constant as the rotation of the body. Some may argue that the progression may cause greater variation in the speed of rotation (ie it speeds up & slows down at various points throughout a turn), but even if that's true, it would be so subtle as to be unnoticeable to the person dancing. And it's certainly nowhere near as extreme in rotational velocity change as actual spotting, which itself is only marginally effective at reducing dizziness. So whatever techniques you may try to employ to vary the speed of your rotation in Viennese Waltz will, unfortunately, have effectively zero impact on how dizzy you get.
This brings me back to where I started: If good Viennese technique, as important as it is, doesn't help alleviate dizziness, then what does? In a word: Conditioning. I'm sorry to have to say this, but there's only one good way to get used to turning and spinning in any context: Do it a LOT. You'll have to endure some dizziness in the meantime, but you'll get over it.
Here's one helpful hint for the meantime: Dizziness increases with each additional turn in the same direction. To solve the problem, don't turn so many times in one direction. If four turns in a row is too much for you, limit yourself to two at a time for the first few months. Then upgrade to three at a time, and do that for a few more months. As you get more and more conditioned to continuous turns, four in a row eventually won't be so daunting (especially since they're presumably followed by four more in the opposite direction). The more often you reverse your direction of turn, the less dizzy you get. So start by changing direction more frequently, and work up to more continuous turns as you become more conditioned to turning.
Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
www.ballroomdancers.com
