Originally posted by SocialDancer:
If we ask a beginner/non-dancer to step forward LF but to place the LF in line with the RF then we _may_ get CBMP, but I think it more likely that we will get a left side lead.
First, what a non-dancer does is irrelevant. Who cares if they do it wrong, they're not dancing and that's what we're discussing. And if a dancer does it wrong then they're screwing up their frame. You might get away with the wrong action by yourself, but with a partner it won't work properly and you'll soon figure out the right way to do it. I'm not sure what would happen if you tried to put the wrong side fwd like that while dancing with a partner -- I'm guessing you'd end up unbalanced to some degree.
It was the "naturally" brings the opposite side forward I had problems with. Natural for a dancer familiar with the feel of CBMP but not necessarily for a beginner.
OK, a total beginner may not get it right away. But he/she will be taught how to do it correctly from the start since it's a basic technique. Beginners aren't going to be allowed to take the wrong side forward and if they do it anyway they'll find out soon enough why they shouldn't. Maybe "naturally" isn't the ideal word for 100% of the cases, but when talking about dancers, it's going to hold true for just about everyone who's out of the absolute beginner stage and has learned CBM(P) already. I think the overall percentage of absolute beginners is small enough that my statement was still pretty accurate.
P.S. -- the actual phrase was "pretty naturally". I specifically avoided saying "naturally" alone to imply that there's a chance it won't be completely natural for everyone, all of the time.
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James Marshall
marshall@astro.umd.edu http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall
