Dance is talking.
A second article on mechanics, all about the biomechanics of physical frame, and the psychology of good dancers.
I recently wrote about an essential mindset for how to move your legs in partner dances: dance is walking, a lamentably absent lesson in dance schools. But of course, dance is more than leg mechanics. As will become clear in this article, everything that is not leg mechanics can be captured by all the senses of one word: frame. And indeed, if a dance schools treats frame as an afterthought, it hardly teaches anything about dancing at all.
- Mechanics
- Dance is a conversation
- Physical frame: tension and pressure
- Mental frame: intention and attention
- Conclusion
Mechanics
This is the second article I’ve written about the mechanics of partner dances like son and casino. Mechanics are the raw tools which are used to build a dance, but are themselves not particularly associated with any dance. I would say there are three domains of mechanics in partner dance: how to use your legs, how to hold frame, and how to parse instruments in music. Mechanics are like the skill of paint mixing: any painter has to learn how to combine paint colours to get the ones he needs, but knowing how to mix paint doesn’t suggest what to paint or what style to paint in. It is necessary – in fact, it is more necessary than anything else – but not sufficient.
In my opinion, a proper dance school should start its curriculum with several classes on mechanics, before teaching anything about figures. Currently, figure-first education is far more widespread than mechanics-first education, and it results in people who “know” a lot (depending on your definition of “knowing”) without being able to execute any of it well. The more intelligent dancers may or may not eventually teach themselves proper mechanics from year(s) of social practice and feedback, tuning their signals for each figure and then generalising across those to deduce what they should’ve been taught from day one. Figure-first education is very reminiscent of whole-language learning, where, in contrast to teaching how words are built up using phonics, students are taught to read by simply memorising entire words on sight, like pre-packaged blobs of meaning that apparently don’t consist of building blocks.
Dance is a conversation
Frame has very broad and very narrow interpretations and I will switch between them in this article. In the broadest sense, frame is the medium of the dance. Frame comprises every force and every thought that exists only because of the dance. It is in the frame where the actual dance itself exists. In contrast, if you just let two people “vibe-dance” on a dance floor and have them hold hands, the partner dance doesn’t exist anywhere, because there is no aspect of broad-sense frame.
Frame in the very narrowest understanding is purely about physical posture in a closed position. Yet, not only are there more physical frames (necessarily, because if there was no frame in open position, there could be no dance in open position), there are also very important mental frames without which the dance will not work out.
Physical frame: tension and pressure
The leader has to be able to communicate what he wants to do. Since he can’t transfer his message over the air using his voice, he has to transfer his message through points of contact where tension and pressure are exchanged.
Calibrated counterforce
The most important take-away about physical frame is that physical frame is a two-person effort. I will give concrete examples of this below, but the core idea is as follows.
A signal is a physical force that instructs the follower where to walk or how to turn. For such a force to be clear, four things need to be true: it should apply to the follower’s chest, it should be maintained for long enough, it should be strong enough in absolute terms, and it should be strong enough relative to the baseline frame.
Anatomy
Dancers connect to each other via their arms. For the purposes of signals, a human really only consists of four pieces: a forearm, an upper arm, a torso, and legs. These four pieces are respectively connected over three hinges: the elbow, the shoulder, and the waist. The legs are fixed in space due to friction with the ground, whilst the other three parts (torso, upper arm, lower arm) will move around their hinges when forces are applied to them unless certain muscles are activated.
Stable contact points
It should be obvious that a weak force cannot be a clear signal, because the follower just doesn’t feel it. So, you need to apply a force that is strong by itself.
A force strong enough so that a follower can feel it, is certainly strong enough to move a body part around its hinge. When the follower has no/weak/loose frame and the leader applies such a force, it will merely move its point of contact rather than travelling to the chest. This is a problem for two reasons: first, because it is the chest (i.e. the solid part of the body connected to the ribcage, starting at the waist and going up to the shoulder sockets) where force is felt clearest, and second, because a strong force cannot be applied to a movable body part for long enough before it locks out and the entire force changes.
Without good follower frame, the leader could yank on the follower’s hand and it would indeed accelerate quickly towards him, but this would stop once her arm is extended. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the follower to apply a counterforce at the points of contact with the leader to keep them in-place. When the points of contact stay in-place, forces can be applied to them indefinitely. And, since the only way to keep the points of contact in-place is to brace the three hinges, signals will necessarily travel through the elbow, through the shoulder, and not be lost at the waist.
If she doesn’t do this, the leader has no communication channel to send her signals. No counterforce means no medium. No medium means no dance.
Don’t overdo it
So, should the follower be rock-solid the whole time? Should she pull herself forward on the leader’s arm? Or should she exaggerate her counterforces to make clear that she is not someone with loose frame? No! Not only will she make herself and her leader physically tired (and even cause injuries), but also, she will likely have more difficulty receiving signals. This is because of the Weber-Fechner law: the larger the baseline force she applies, the larger the increase in force will be needed to make her feel a difference.
Instead, a follower should calibrate her counterforce: when the leader initiates contact, she should start increasing her pulling/pushing force (which one depends on the kind of contact point) until each contact point is not moved by the leader anymore, and she should stop there.
Life cycle of a signal
When the leader starts a signal, the follower’s body, trying not to move the contact point, will increase the counterforce she applies there. At some point, she notices this happening in her shoulder (“Okay, now I’m definitely applying more force than before, this is not just an accident.”) and starts moving according to the signal.
Eventually the goal of the signal is achieved, and a new signal will be given. In principle, it should be possible to smoothly fade from one signal into the other, never breaking frame. Frame stays, and signals (with different directions and magnitudes) ride on top of it.
For example, when leading an enchufla, the first bar is signalled counterclockwise over her head, and the second bar is signalled clockwise between the couple. The transition happens when the hand is coming down on 3 or 4, so that the follower can react on 5. One of the things you may notice in practice is that you have more trouble leading the second bar than the first bar, and the reason for this is frame. Beginner followers regularly break frame when reorienting themselves after a turn.
Open frame: one point of contact
The position in which it is easiest to distinguish good frame from bad frame as described above, is that which has only one point of contact and wherein the couple is an arm’s length apart, holding just one hand (in casino’s posición abierta and sometimes posición caída, this is either of the leader’s hands holding the follower’s right hand). This is an open frame. Surprisingly, I have personally only ever witnessed one teacher explicitly explain that “frame” applies to open positions just as much as to closed positions (see below).
An open frame is mediated through pulling force, a.k.a. tension. Below are some guidelines for upholding this tension. These principles still hold when dancing with two hands held, mainly because only one of the two hands actually applies tension to lead the follower’s movement.
Locked hinges, not épaulement
As described above, three hinges need to be locked for the frame to work.
If the elbow and shoulder are not engaged, the arm can elongate and the signal can never reach the chest. If the elbow is engaged but not the shoulder and waist, the torso rotates around its axis and the shoulder of the hand being held comes to the foreground. In ballet, this is called épaulement (“shouldering”) and although it is desirable there, it is detrimental to the communication speed in dance, because then the signal can only arrive once the follower’s chest has rotated a full 90° or 180°. (This is is why ballerinas potentially struggle learning open frame, which happened to a friend of mine who learnt casino from me.)
The 90-degree rule, not stretched arms
The best guideline for open frame is that both leader and follower should try to keep their elbow at a 90° angle. Then, all of the principles above should be applied: do not just flex the arm to have it stay rigid at 90°. You can hold your arm up at a 90° angle without flexing. Do this, and only apply counterforce to keep the hand in the same location.
There are exceptions to this rule: in particular, when the follower is led around the leader, she likely has to extend her elbow to have more space. She should not do this proactively, i.e. preemptively extend her elbow when there is still room not to do so.
Actively extending the elbow is always bad. Notably, it is even worse for leaders than it is for followers to have a permanently stretched arm: as Luis Duarte once remarked during a workshop, no leading can happen through a stretched arm. (We can be a little more precise: it is impossible to create frame with appropriate tension for a leader who keeps a stretched arm stretched, and it is impossible to receive frame for a follower who does not keep a stretched arm stretched.1 In any case, for the purposes of positioning, neither should stretch the arm because it will cause too much distance and will obviously inhibit turns.)
Easy tests
There are two easy tests you can run to see if you and your follower understand the above principles: you should be able to make your follower walk towards you (e.g. doing a reina on a caminala), and you should be able to turn her clockwise by her right hand, with no delay, confusion or brute force.
Pushing
Push signals in an open frame, rather than pull signals, are reserved for dances like West-Coast swing, not casino. You should not push your follower away when preparing an exhibela, since she is supposed to be walking forwards. And if you prepare for a vacilala by dramatically pushing on the follower with your right hand, I can guarantee you that followers wish you weren’t so rough and unclear with them.
(For completeness: a block, like the one done in this video at 1:09, does not count, since it does not instruct the follower to go anywhere. Similarly, the push in a guapea does not count as a signal, but anyway, you will go to hell if you do it.)
Closed frame: two points of contact
In a closed frame (in casino, this applies to posición cerrada and sometimes also posición caída), there are two points of contact:2 one is at the base of the leader’s left and follower’s right hand, the other is at the elbow of the leader’s right and follower’s left arm.
Both of these contact points should apply a pushing force, i.e. pressure. The contact point at the hand applies forward-backward pressure. The contact point at the elbows applies upward-downward pressure: the leader pushes up and the follower calibrates a downward push.
It is more difficult to teach the principles of frame using this closed frame, because if it is done incorrectly, it may still look the same as when it is done correctly. It is much more difficult to fake good open frame.
Purpose
You may wonder what the purpose of upward pressure is. After all, the leader isn’t trying to signal to the follower that she should fly. The purpose of upward-downward pressure is actually to open a channel for leftward-rightward or forward-backward forces. Coulomb’s law of dry friction says that when two objects touch and a force is applied to only one of them, the magnitude required to make the objects slide in any direction along each other rather than sticking together and moving as one big object, is proportional to the existing force perpendicular to it. In other words: when you press together two objects hard enough, they behave as one object. In our case, the more up-down pressure the couple has at the elbow, the more violently the leader would need to move his elbow side-to-side to slip away from under the follower’s elbow. And so, the more upward-downward force there is at the elbow, the more room the leader has for applying strong leftward-rightward and forward-backward signals.
There can’t be any signal, not even for a short amount of time, when the elbows slip. The biggest mistake beginner followers make in closed position, then, is making the threshold for slipping too small, by having no or loose frame at the elbow. Some beginners hold a rigid arm, but hover it over the leader’s elbow, sometimes even with a gap, and clearly there can be no communication then. Other followers rest their elbow on the leader’s, but when he then tries to move his elbow upward to provide his end of the frame, she doesn’t apply any counterforce and just lets her elbow move up with his.
The biggest mistake “advanced” followers make in closed position, is to apply even more force than is needed to keep the connection on the leader’s strongest possible signal. In my experience, these women either lack grace in general, or they have some kind of desire to dominate the men on the dance floor. Indeed, if she exaggerates the forces in her frame, the leader can either literally be pushed over, or he can calibrate himself: this unnecessary for his leading, it is tiring for both, it reduces sensitivity to signals due to the Weber-Fechner law, and most importantly, it means the follower is leading because the leader is calibrating himself to her signals.
Note that the contact point at the hand is also used for forward-backward and leftward-rightward signals, except only one of them is mediated by friction and the other is direct pushing.
Mental frame: intention and attention
The dance takes place not only inside a physical frame, but also in a mental frame. As I’ll describe below, mental frame is not just some vague mindset like “be happy” nor is it about musicality or planning. This article is about mechanics, not about models, and without these mental frames there is no point trying to execute any amount of figures.
Leading frame
Firstly, the leader should feel responsible. Not just for his follower’s safety, but for making her time worthwhile. For the dance to be interesting, it is the leader who must, of his own accord, interpret the music and plan the progression of the dance. He should feel like this is his duty; there should be pressure to perform. The danger of teaching leaders something like “the basic step” is that they never develop this responsibility. They will think it is appropriate to be unassertive and plan nothing at all.
Secondly, like elsewhere in life, leading is only possible in a decisive mental frame. It’s one thing to make a plan, but it is useless to have a plan without also committing to every step. There is no room for indecision. There is no room for self-doubt. There is no room for delegation. There is no room for permission-seeking: it is not “Do you want to do something like thi- or uh, something like that, maybe?” but rather “We will do this thing now.” A leader who is not decisive will give ambiguous, weak signals: either he doesn’t dare to instruct a woman because he was conditioned to think this is imposing and oppressive, or he is afraid to choose between multiple possible options (and therefore gives a mix of all of their signals) because he is scared to be judged negatively by the woman in front of him, assuming he may make the wrong choice from her perspective.
Thirdly, the leader should be timely. A decisive leader may be committed to his plan, but if he only reveals it to the follower when she should already be moving, he is setting her up to fail. To make a follower walk somewhere or turn her, tension should be applied at least 2 counts beforehand. If you ask maleducated casino dancers when an enchufla or a prima starts, they will tell you it starts on 1, or maybe on 2. But it does not. It starts on 7 of the last bar, transitioning smoothly from the tension of the previous figure.
Lastly, the leader should guide, not puppeteer. The follower is not an extension of the leader. She should not be dragged around forcefully like a ragdoll. She should be guided so that she can move autonomously. For example, there is a very big difference between clearly and decisively signalling that the follower should make a counterclockwise turn, versus just forcefully pushing her right arm over her left shoulder, which is very typical of bad leaders.
And, by the way, the above qualities of a good dance leader can be readily mapped to the qualities of desirably masculine men in a relationship context.
Following frame
As touched on above, physically, the follower should calibrate the force she applies to the leader’s frame, not make the leader calibrate himself to her desired level of force.
Mentally, a good follower is surrendering first and foremost. She accepts that she is being led by someone else and does not decide in his place what the couple does next. She does not change the instruction into a completely different one just because she wanted to do the other thing. The only reason a follower would not surrender to her leader, is that she trusts herself much more than she trusts him, which either reflects poorly on the leader, or, equally often, her massively inflated ego. And seriously, from the point of view of a leader, a follower looks like a complete circus clown when she starts moving hands to give herself signals to turn. You don’t decide. It’s not your place.
Secondly, the follower should be actively engaged. Because indeed, someone who surrenders merely doesn’t do what she wants to do, but that doesn’t mean she does anything. If she does not use her own muscles to follow the signal, she more or less compels her leader to manhandle and puppeteer her. Such a dance will look like she is being forced against her will, violently dragged from one place to another. Instead, she should hold frame, and act on the signals in the frame by using her own muscles. The unengaged follower and the brutalistic leader often find each other on the dance floor, under the misconception that forces in the frame are meant to accelerate the follower. No. It is not the leader’s arm that gives the follower speed. It is the follower’s legs and feet. The leader acts not as the power generator, but as a relay system that instructs a much stronger system to generate power.
Thirdly, the follower should be attentive to what is communicated to her, rather than anticipating a signal. For example, in casino, perhaps the most obvious anticipatory blunder that shows up in beginner followers is as follows: when the leader performs a coronala in caída, followers often anticipate that they should (have) turn(ed) clockwise over their right shoulder. Either they will do a full turn, or they will lead themselves into some kind of mirror image of Kentucky, turning themselves half a turn clockwise to the leader’s left on 8 (since the coronala happens around 7). Except, no leader would ever lead that. Not only because there are no more counts left in the bar, but also because there exists no mirror image of enchufla or Kentucky, since casino has chirality. Indeed, this is a figure that exists entirely in the hallucination of followers. The leader merely draped the follower’s hand on her shoulder, with no rotational impulse; the fact that she turns on 8 means that she stopped listening to the connection, hallucinated a signal that wasn’t there, and overrode the leader’s instruction with her own imagination. Sometimes, it is done out of hubris, essentially telling the leader “you probably meant this, you just didn’t lead me correctly”. The majority of the time, it is a panic response due to loss of frame. The attentive follower would feel tension in her right arm.
What happens when these are not embodied
The reason why these mindsets are so important that I consider them part of mechanics, is that when the leader and follower do not keep these respective roles in mind, the dance falls apart.
The most common role failure you will find on the dance floor, is leaders failing to embody the mental frame of a leader. Such a bad leader is recognisable as a whimp: he lacks masculinity, and is therefore hesitant to guide, which prevents the follower from properly executing her role. He crumbles under the responsibility of planning an interesting dance. You ask him to plan an interesting sequence and he can’t do it. You ask him to give a clear signal, and he can’t do it, for either of the reasons I gave above: fear of being too controlling, or fear of not pleasing the woman with his choices.
Less common, but equally bad, are followers who refuse to allow the man to determine the course of the dance. Such a follower is a control freak: she has too much entitlement and masculinity and therefore she starts sending signals through the frame to either lead herself, or to lead the leader. This is known as backleading, and it can be described as many things: the follower counteracting and rejecting the forces applied by the leader, mixed signals existing on the same channel and thus leading to unintelligibility, the follower talking over the leader rather than listening, the couple trying to execute two different figures at the same time (which is impossible), and so on. This sets both dancers up for disappointment: the follower will be disappointed because the leader does not go along with her lead and doesn’t manage to lead a good dance, which in turn is frustrating to the leader because the dance he was leading was not executed properly, making him look bad despite the follower’s mindset being outside of his control.
And again, I should point out that these behaviours map to relationships. Unpleasant ones, this time. Do not be a whimp. Do not be a control freak. Learn to be a masculine man and a feminine woman.
Solo frame: zero points of contact
Everything in this section is technically optional for a partner dance, although it fits in the rest of this article and will still make the dance better. In
Firstly, it is important that the entire body is part of the dance. A hand that is not held by the other person (in one-handed holds or when dancing solo) should still be part of the dance. Body frame is therefore at the intersection of physical frame and mental frame: every body part should at the very least be aware of the dance, for example by keeping enough muscles engaged to hold up each free arm, instead of letting it hang by your side. Even better would be to add intentional movement to every body part, although this requires coordination that is trained over much longer time.
Secondly, when the couple has broken up into two solo dances and the intention to lead and follow no longer applies, they should still pay attention to each other. What this entails is sort of vague, but it comes down to something like “don’t show off in such a way that it wouldn’t matter if the other person was there or not”.
When leader and follower are solo dancing, it is definitely true that both have equal say until the moment at which the leader decides to re-establish the couple. It is also true that “paying attention” does not just mean “mirroring”, because that would not really be a solo, and also, it is impossible for two people to mirror each other at the same time. So, usually, one person sets a frame, and the other accepts or rejects it, like a call-response structure.
For example, the follower may start some intricate solo involving front crossing, and the leader may respond with a Suzie Q step to tell her “I see you, and I can do something like that too!” Later on, the leader could start advancing towards the follower with a yuka step, while the follower starts a rumba basic. If both keep dancing their respective step, they are disconnected, and this is not good. In such a case, one of them will organically decide to abort what they were doing and either step into the frame of the other, or make an alternative proposal. In the example, the follower may cede to the leader since he reciprocated her before, or the leader may abort his yuka and start dancing rumba if he is in the mood for it. If she insists and, for example, dancing rumba is just not appropriate at that time in the music, he could initiate a cajón step by passing her on his right, and re-evaluate if she will now give up and step into his frame.
Conclusion
Frame is the medium of the dance. It is the mechanism of communication between the two dancers. Physical frame allows the leader to apply sufficiently strong and prolonged tension so that the follower feels in her core where to go next. Hence, the frame is maintained by the follower at each point of contact using calibrated counterforce and by locking the hinges that could prevent the signal from reaching her core.
Mental frame requires the leader to be decisive and timely, and requires the follower to be attentive and surrendering. Leaders who lack the masculinity to assert their will, cannot produce clear signals nor an interesting dance. Followers who lack the femininity to cede control, will sabotage the enjoyment of both.
For leaders this is because they generate tension exactly by flexing the elbow, which is impossible when extending it. For followers this is because when all the hinges are at their extremes (épaulement with a stretched arm), a pulling force at the hand is guaranteed to travel to the feet and thus she will feel the signal, but it is difficult to know when the signal has achieved its purposes if the distance between a follower’s hand and her body varies during the signal. ↩︎
It is sometimes taught that there are four points of contact in closed position, not two, namely each person’s free hand on the other person’s shoulder blade. Whilst that may be a good resting position, it is unnecessary for those hands to touch the other person. As far as communication goes, the leader is not communicating anything with his shoulder blades, so the follower’s hand will not receive any signals at that point of contact. The leader’s hand on the back of the follower may help apply a sideways force if the follower doesn’t understand that she should move sideways, but this would really be to forcefully drag her if she isn’t acting on the signal at the elbow by her own volition. ↩︎
