Learn To Ice Dance - With A Partner!!

Hey skaters, welcome back. I'm so glad you're here. I am coach Julia and today in honor of the ice dancing happening in the Olympics, we're going to do a little ice dancing on my channel. Now I thought what would be fun today is to teach you some partner positions. So in the past I have taught ice dances as a solo pattern dance, but today we are going to play around with doing it with your partner. Now I have a lovely dear friend of mine here who is going to be doing these with me. This is Sam. You have seen her here before I'm sure. You've done some ice dancing. I have. So this is perfect. Now traditionally what you're seeing on TV is going to be a male and female partner. That is not us. So since I'm a little taller, I'm going to be doing the male or now we call it leading role. Okay. And you're going to be doing the female or following role. You can mix it up however you want. If you are ice dancing with your friends, grab your friend, figure some of this out, have some fun. So we're going to start with a position called the Killian position and hopefully we'll also get to the waltz position. But what we're going to do is some chassés and swing roles. Now I've taught this on my channel before. So if you haven't done chassés and swing roles, I'll put a link down below, but also just scroll up in this playlist. I'll have them here. But today we're going to do those in the Killian position. We're going to start with my partner on my right side. Now there are some dances where I would switch to the other side, but generally I'm going to be on her left. She's going to be on my right. I am going to take my right hand and place it over here on her right hip. You can see right there on her hip bone. Okay. Nice and secure. And she can either have her hand out really pretty somewhere or she can place it on my hand and then we are working together. Okay. I'm going to put my left hand up and thank you so much, ma'am. You're welcome, ma'am. She's holding onto my thumb over here so we have a nice secure grip. So this is the Killian position. You can do this in ice dancing. You can do it in spinning. In fact, if you come back next week, we're going to do a Killian spin, so you don't want to miss out on that. Hit that subscribe button so you can see the spin in this position. We're going to start with doing something called a chasse. The interesting thing about doing with a partner is you're going to have one person on a bigger circle and one person on a smaller circle and that's going to trade. So when we work counterclockwise, she's on the big circle. I'm on the small circle. When we work clockwise, I'm on the big circle. She's on the small circle. So you have to adjust the size of your footwork, the amount of lean you have. The other thing is you can see our feet are very close. So I always say how you need to bring your feet into a little shoe box in between. This is sometimes hard to remember to do when you're by yourself, but if you don't do it with your partner, exactly. Okay? So you need to be careful and bring your feet together in between every move so you do not knock your partner over. Please. Okay, we're going to start with a chasse. So since we're facing this way, we'll start going clockwise. I had to think about the direction for a moment. So I'm going to lean into my partner a little bit and she's going to lean into the circle. So we're going to go one, two, three, and one, two, three, and one, two, three, and one, two, three. So a couple of things to think about when you're working with a partner. You don't want to be leaning forward and backward because that's going to throw your partner off. You want your axis to stay right over your feet. So you can lean side to side with your partner, but if you are twisting and not confident in your own core and your own stability, you're going to knock your partner over and have or at least give them a very difficult time holding onto themselves. And you want to make sure your actions are making sure your partner is safe. If your actions are not safe for your partner, you need to go back and work on your single skating a little bit. Let's go over that again. So what I mean is if I'm leaning forward, you can see I'm going to hit my partner's arm and shoulder and immediately Sam is thrown off her axis. And if I lean back, she's going to be pulled back and then very likely we're going down. Very likely. So we want to move together. So when I'm leaning towards my circle, she's coming with me. When she's leaning towards her circle, I'm coming with her, but we're always staying upright. Okay. Let's try a couple more of those chasse. So now she's going to lean into my circle with me and now I'm going to lean into her circle with her. So we are moving as one and keeping our bodies as close as we can to each other. This is fun. It is fun. That was our chasse step together. We're going to try it now with a swing roll. It is even more important to be careful with your legs because as our leg is coming through, we don't want to be kicking our partner. The other thing I want you to remember is anytime you're in this Killian position, you need to keep this space here as small as possible. That way you're really moving together. If you open up, for one thing, it's harder to create the same lean because your body's, you can't feel your partner's body as well. When you're really connected, you can feel everything your partner is doing and it makes it easier to move as one and also then you're more likely to be on the same circle. When you're on separate circles, you're going to be leaning differently. You can yank your partner funny. Really try to eliminate any space there. There is no personal space in ice dancing. Well, maybe there is a little bit. Not in this position. Not in this one. My feet want their own personal space, but no personal space anywhere else. Yes. Okay. Let's try the swing roll. We're going to do it going clockwise since we're facing this direction. We're going to go one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. The swing rolls are a little bit more difficult to do. If you don't have the chasse down yet, just spend some time working with your partner and making sure you're feeling how the other person moves. You can even try these more separate. You can try them next to each other and try to get the shape correct. That will help baby step you into doing it from a Killian. That way, if you're feeling like the Killian is a little scary with the swing rolls, you can do a preliminary step, but it is fun to do it in the proper position. It's very fun. Yes. One more thing I can have you think about when you're practicing this is where you're looking. You're going to look towards the direction where you're going. That way, she can look at me as we're rotating my side, and I can look over towards her as we're rotating her side. That really helps us stay together a bit more as well. The looking helps us create more lean, and honestly, it's just more dramatic. Let's try those swing rolls. We're going to look to the left as our toe goes to the left, look to the right as our toe goes to the right. Remember, she's making a big circle here. I'm making a big circle here. You're going to feel a smaller circle when you're on the inside and a bigger circle when you are on the outside. That is a couple things you can try in the Killian position. Now, we're going to try those things in the waltz position. The waltz position we're going to do facing each other. This means one of you has to have learned your chassés and swing rolls backwards, which again, I have a tutorial, so just scroll up in this playlist, and you can learn how to do these backwards. I am playing that strong and sturdy male in this relationship. I'm going to be going forwards, lucky me. Sam gets to go backwards. I'm going to place my hand on Sam's shoulder blade here. We're not going down. We're not going way up. We're not grabbing her shoulder. We are finding that shoulder blade and putting our hand on it. Nice supportive position. Sam, do you want to show them where your hand is going? I'm going to place my hand right up here on the shoulder by the collarbone. You can do it like this. Whatever feels best for you and your partner. I like doing this with Coach Julia. That way also if I make her mad, she can just slide up. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I would never. No. Then I'm going to place my hand out. She is going to hold my hand. If you want to, you can do the little pinky thing or the pointer finger and pinky, but gives it a little bit more security there. We're going to start with chassés. I think this is the easiest thing to start with as far as this position. I'm going to be moving into her and she's moving away from me. With the Killian, there's no personal space. With this one, there is. There's all this space between us right here. We want to maintain that frame. You can practice. Let's just do some little half pumps. You can practice some pumps where you're just going down in a nice slalom pattern and maintaining the position between you and keeping the gap from disappearing. You can try it that way first and just swoop and swoop and you're leaning with your partner and you're feeling the position and you're making sure you don't collapse that frame in the middle. Okay. Once you practice that, then we can do some actual chassés. It's the same thing, just a little fancier. Okay. Are you ready? Ready? Let's do it. We're going to go counterclockwise first. Push and push, push and push. Now we're going to try this with some swing rolls. Since you're going to be swinging your leg, you need to be really careful with where you're swinging it. Again, you do not want to injure your partner. You don't want to injure anyone, but especially not the person that you're skating with. Okay. Do you want to try them just here? Sure. Okay. We can do the same thing where we're doing our swing rolls, but we're just going to be a little bit farther open so that we can see where our partner's legs are. I'm going to swing and I'm going to move my leg and watch how far her leg moves back. I'm going to try to fill the spot that she is vacating. As she swings back, my leg is going to swing right into that spot. This is a way to practice the timing and make sure you know, you have that awareness of where your partner is moving. You can practice it that way. That was really fun, actually. Then we can do it in the proper waltz position. Okay. You ready to try this in the full waltz position? Yes. Yay. Okay. We're going back to our waltz position. I'm being that nice, strong frame for my partner. We're going to push and swing right into the area where our partner's leg just left. So we're working together. The nice thing is our lobes can be the same size where they're in this shape. Where the Killian, we have a small lobe and a large lobe. When we're in the waltz, our lobes can be the same size, which is really nice. So what you want to do is again, bring those feet nice and close together and move your leg in tandem with your partner. So your leg is going right into the little gap where your partner's leg is swinging backwards. I guess you can see that here. Let's do it on the side angle. So I'm going to swing forward as she swings back and that way we don't kick each other with our toe kicks. Yes. Dangerous. And painful. Sam, thank you so much for doing these partner positions with me. If you guys want to see more partners with the amazing coach, Sam, she's going to come back to do some pair skating with me next week while the pairs is on in the Olympics. So I'm excited to have you back. Yes. Thank you for letting me play ice dancer. You're welcome. Thanks for joining me. I hope you guys enjoyed that. If you did, please do give us that thumbs up. And as always, I'm looking forward to reading all your comments in that section down below. If you haven't done so yet, then hit that subscribe button so you can see all my videos when they come out. Happy skating and I'll see you next time.