New Ideas for Across the Floor

Published on January 28th 2021 by Hillary-Marie

 Have you hit a point where you’ve exhausted across the floor steps in your classes?

Flap ball change…

Drawback...

Buffalo…

Maxiford turns…

Pullback combinations…

You start to feel like you’re running out of ideas…

Here’s how I never run out of across the floor exercises!

You need to start building short across the floor combinations using those basic steps that you feel you’ve completely exhausted.

It doesn’t need to be a GINORMOUS long combo, just something that dancers can pick up quickly and easily with pattern recognition.

So instead of flap ball change across the floor, it’s…

fl-ap fl-ap fl-ap ball-change l shu-ffle hop step fl-ap ball-change
a 1   a 2   a 3   a 4                     a 1   a  2   a 3   a 4
 R      L      R     L R                       L     R  L    R     L R

You start to build mini phrases that are easy to pick up, and easily repeated from left to right.

As the dancers get more advanced, you can go from 2 bar phrases, to 4 bar phrases, and so on.

The goal isn’t to build a ginormous piece of choreography across the floor, but rather to push their ability to recognize short phrased patterns while honing their travel technique across the floor.

Give this a go! And I promise you’ll never run out of across the floor steps.

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