[This is an attempt to write down some of the material I teach, in the hopes of helping my students better remember and integrate it... and perhaps to cover up any lapses, if I don't teach EXACTLY the same thing on Thursday and Monday.
Micro Blues 1 was covered in week 1, along with Quality Touch and Posture (Tensegrity)]
Micro blues is something that we sort of came up with in the early 2000s, as blues dancing was reinvented at house parties. We didn’t have much room to dance back then, or a lot of technical structure holding us back. So we would dance to songs like Gene Harris’s Summertime, and try to fit our movement to it. What often fit was very small movements.
I’ve seen micro blues taught many ways, all valid as far as I’m concerned. This is mine.
Easy (Right Brain) Micro Blues
This is what I most often teach. It’s light on technique, but extremely rich in enjoyment, and consequently it drives the philosophy. Complete newbies to dance can do it.
To prepare, find some stillness in your body… doesn’t even have to be perfect stillness. The posture could be the basic close embrace posture, or you could even do this in open embrace. There are four types of movements which are now allowed… I think I only mentioned the first three in Thursday’s class. Both partners can more or less lead/suggest these. Needless to say, all this is very subtle and someone watching might not even know that anything is actually happening.
First and most important, use your breath as a lead. Break up the rhythm so there’s something unexpected to follow: in-in-ooooooout… in-iiiiiiiiiiin-out-pause-out. Stuff like that. In doing the demo for the class, I showed this by connecting my posture to my breath – lifting on the in-breath, dropping on the out-breath. I don’t recommend being that obvious when you’re not demonstrating for other people.
Second, small isolations. If you can do them (they’re technically more difficult, I’m still working on mine), they make a great subtle lead for micro blues. Sometimes I just call them wiggles, to take some emphasis away from that hard technical work.
Third, use the 1-10 tension scale to change how much energy is in your body – either your whole body, or specific parts. You can think of this as preparing for an isolation, and not doing it. Even more subtle, but your partner can get it.
The fourth and final easy micro blues vocabulary is making the big movements you would normally make, but doing them bit by bit, over 20 seconds or so. So everything does become micro.
Difficult (Left Brain) Micro Blues
To me, this is much more challenging and much more rewarding. I teach two things in this context: the 30-position weight shift (trying to stay relaxed and connected throughout), and quarter-inch, whole body movement sequences. This requires a lot more body control, a lot more stillness, a lot more intentional leading and following. We didn’t get into this part in week 1.
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