Charleston Dance: Basic Posture

Video Transcript

"So Charleston is a very athletic dance. There's a lot of bouncing going on, yes, apparently a lot of posing going on, but basically you need to have some energy for this. And where you're going to get the energy is from the floor. So you want to have kind of an athletic stance. If you've ever played any sports, basketball, tennis, whatever, something like that, you want to have your feet kind of shoulder width apart, your weight is going to be primarily on the balls of your feet so not rocked back on your heels, not tipping forward on your toes, but just nicely balanced on the balls of your feet. And you're kind of ready for anything. So that's kind of how you want to ground yourself for the Charleston. So if you're not sure if you're in that ready position, you can try just jumping, and when you land, you're probably in that ready position, nice and grounded on the floor. The other thing that's helpful when you're doing the Charleston is keeping a nice pulse. So the pulse coming from the knees, full bodied, and it's kind of a double time type of pulse. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Okay, so Tara's going to play some music and we'll show you how that integrates with the music. So normally just starting the dance, I'll get pulsing in the side by side position with my partner to make sure that we're kind of hearing the same thing in the music. Yeah. So if I were hearing something else, if I was off the beat, then it might look like this instead. And you can see this is going to be sort of uncomfortable. We're not working together. So I'm not even going to try the dance if we're at this point. I'm going to say, "hold on". You may just start all over again and say, "oh, there we are. Pulsing together. Now we're ready to start the dance". Yeah. So we're jut going down, down, down, down, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That's the posture and the pulse of Charleston."