1/24/11 post: counting, not cheating

Hi Friends:

Happy Monday to you all! And look, it's still morning! I finished my holiday and thank-you cards this past weekend, and I feel like I'm finally catching up to where I should be this year. Time travel is possible!

I wanted to talk a little about how Zumba songs are choreographed, so that it might make it easier to learn new songs. Zumba songs are broken out, general, by intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-final chorus, in other words, the natural breaks of the song. If you hear a rhthym or key change, odds are the move is going to change.

I was also thinking about all the counting we do in Zumba, and I thought I should share it with you a couple of thoughts, because even if you feel like you can't dance, I'm sure you feel like you can count to eight.

Most of what we do comes in eight counts. I'm really crap at explaining things, but if you don't know, an eight count is just that: you count to eight over and over again at the same tempo, usually to a song. You can use this eight count to do a particular step (for example, a basic salsa step is 1-2-3-center-5-6-7-center), or for choreographing the song in general.

What this means for our class: mathematically, it usually breaks down in sets of two, four, or eight. We'll take four steps to the left, four steps to the right, and repeat that pattern four times. For example in the Bollywood/Indian song, we step forward with turn-the-lightbulb hands four times, then step back four times, and do that whole thing four times total before the chorus.

In addition, there is almost always symmetry in a move--if we do four on the left, we will do four on the right. I would never do 7 on one side and 16 on the other. Not only would it mess up the easy-math choreography style I have, it's also unsatisfactory on a more basic level. You might leave feeling lopsided. : )

Hopefully, this will help you, if you get a little lost, or if you want to make up your own songs--and if you do, you are free to teach us all!

Let me know if you have questions. Have a good week!

-meredith