Weight On The Balls Of Your Feet

I've commented a whole bunch that there are few practical advantages to hanging out with dancers a lot, since they seem to dance less than people that are learning dance. But sometimes they just see things that you would otherwise miss.

I was hanging out at my chica's place last night and she has a little dancer friend there who teaches contemporáneo. So I say, "well, if I could just learn to balance my weight on the ball of one foot I'd be happy." And I show him how I do it and he looks at my knee position and he realizes that it's all wrong. I always thought the point was to be on the ball of the foot and use the big toe to sort of hold the structure up. This is wrong. The knee has to be over the center of the foot (and then the hip has to be aligned somewhere in this whole thing too, I'll have to figure it out). So the point is that your can't roll onto the arch of your foot, but rather you have to keep your foot centered. So I'll be working with this. The key words are "keep your knee over your middle or third toe."

And then spinning (or doing enrosques of whatever type in tango) uses this same part of the foot. So that's something to work on.