swingandhustle recommended we re-read his original article were he
wrote, among other things:
> At this point, top west coast competitors can cross
> right over with almost NO investment in hustle and win top honors even
> over experienced hustle dancers. If you believe this is just good
> dancing on their part - lets see them do that with tango. The reason
> they can't is Tango and West coast swing are different dances.
I would argue from personal experience that the connection in Argentine
Tango is very different from that of West Coast Swing. An AT connection
mostly involves compression, and for close embrace-style is chest to
chest. In contrast, West Coast Swing and Hustle (and Lindy) connections
are primarily leveraged connections through the arms (and leveraged arm
to back). That means that a substantial ****tion of the "muscle memory"
trained for advanced West Coast Swing lead and follow can, to a limited
extent, apply to Hustle but is completely useless or even
counterproductive for AT.
Nevertheless, while WCS and Hustle may have some commonality in the way
they deal with connection which facilitates cross-over, the 6-count WCS
basic and the 3-count Hustle basic very clearly mark them as different
dances.
This is the core of one of the 8 points in your manifesto against
NY-style Hustle David, and the argument is not just weak, but arguably
wrong. Your suggested response to one of the main selling points of WCS
(musical interpretation and expressiveness) over Hustle appears to be to
speed up Hustle to the point where, as avid_dancer@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
observes,
it can no longer be a primarily lead/follow dance. While that may
decrease the skill-set cross-over between Hustle and WCS, it's not clear
how that would help Hustle maintain a longer sustained interest in most
of its practitioners, since that is necessary for long term survival of
the dance.
Your solution seems counter-intuitive: a greater dependence on rote
patterns and less communication through the physical connection would
seem to be likely to decrease the long-term positive emotional feedback
one obtains from partner dancing. The flatness usually required in 2/4
or 4/4 time music so that it can be used for a three beat basic pattern
dance is already a handicap for emotional investment that works against
the dance. The rapid rotational motion can help induce trance like
states that provide a different positive feedback mechanism, but
climbing the learning curve of a partner dance doesn't seem necessary
for that, as ravers and whirling dervishes can attest.
A number of your other claims either display similar weak sup****ting
arguments or fail to explain why your style solves those issues which
you raise that have some validity. I made some observations which
alluded to those weaknesses in my original post and you pretty well
ignored them.
Perhaps you have some personal charisma that sup****ts a Jobsian Reality
Distortion Field that convinces people of the superiority of your style,
but my personal impression of your posts in this newsgroup is that they
have been less than convincing.
>
> David Flynn
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