It has been held from January 2-5, 2019, one of the most famous Trainings International Camps, organized by the Top Trainer KARINA RUBIO: WINTER TRAINING CAMP ROYAL DANCE.

With the attendance of about 60 international couples of high level, where couples like the Estonian couple of the World championed 10 adult dances Konstantin Gorodilov and Dominika Bergannova.

Also Malthe Brinch & Sandra Sorensen from Denmark. World Ranking Adult position 13.

Another outstanding couple is formed by Marts Smolko & Tina Bazikyna from Latvia, Professional Adult Position 2.
And of course the best Spanish couple of all time from Royal Dance club, Guillem Pascual & Rosa Carné, current position 9 of the Latin world ranking.

Panel of  International Trainers was:

KARINA RUBIO

ALEX CAZORLA

DMITRY TIMOKHIN

PETER STOKKEBROE

HOLGER NITSCHE

CHRISTINA COSTA

JAROSLAV KUCERA

CONSTANTIN VASILE

The training lasted from 10 in the morning until after 9 pm with classes programmed with topics and very interesting focuses in the magnificent dance halls that the Royal Dance Club has.
Classes of Latin and standard classes were given, as well as a complete program full of private classes every day.

Karina, Alex and the Royal Dance Academy have organized these international Camps for several years with 2 annual appointments: in winter and summer. The Royal Dance Academy is located in Manresa, near Barcelona, Spain.

It is a very big and complex problem, it can be divided into two parts, if there is a private life within the couple, and if there is one outside the couple?

If one of the two dancers has a boyfriend / girlfriend, often many problems arise if the private life of the dance is not separated from the beginning, for example “Tuesdays and Thursdays I have private life, the rest of the days, the dance” .
The following questions are posed: should the boy accompany the girl home if he has his private life? And if it’s the girl who has a boyfriend, should she tell her dance partner?
The hardest part is when one of the two had plans about the other, and suddenly they are ruined before their eyes – their dance partner gets married. Usually that leads to the couple dissolving. The husband (who does not dance) can not see his wife hugging other men, not even in Standard, and the woman (if she does not dance) can not accept in her soul the dance partner of her husband, and if she dances, she will constantly think why her husband does not dance with her. And crush her husband with it.
But and within the couple, is there a private life? It turns out that almost all high-level couples come to that. And super professional couples, all. (Except for Berns, in Standard, oddly enough, absolutely all!) And in Latino, as they say, starting with class B there are movements that “you can not dance without being husband and wife”.

There is also the option of couples of siblings, cousins, mother and child, etc. Well, what can we say? Maybe the Standard program can be danced like that (Standard’s are not offended), but the Latino … No matter how skilled the dancers are, the imitation of feelings is still an imitation, and reality is always more unexpected than any imitation . There are no international class couples or professionals who are blood relatives. And that says a lot.

Go ahead the recognition that, even enthusiastic follower and apprentice of this our magnificent discipline, the DANCESPORT, I do not pretend because I can not teach anyone. But I can collaborate, I think, promoting reflection.

In other disciplines that I do know more thoroughly, such as Piano and Tennis, share the same basic principles to which I am going to refer for DANCESPORT: the PRECIPITATION at the time of proceeding to the stage of making the movements in a FAST, EXPLOSIVE way, without -not much less-, being the chosen moment mostly the appropriate one.

I see in Dancesport what I see also in many pianists and tennis players apprentices or in delevoping process They want to be fully employed immediately, and play as a professional.

That is precisely the seriuos mistake of which I humbly claim attention. SPEED -for developing athletes- is the ENEMY not only of PERFECTION, but also of PROGRESSION.

With the SPEED, EVERYTHING is PRECIPITATIVE, and the technique is “DIRTIED AND DAMAGED”.

In the learning of a movement it is necessary to take to the limit the CONCEPT OF NEAT REPETITION, knowing what one does, controlling the movement deforms slowly and mentally “recording in the mind its execution”. For this it is necessary to develop the movements in a SLOW, PAUSED manner and NOT PRECIPITATE THE QUICK EXECUTION PHASE UNTIL YOU HAVE SET THE MOVEMENT TECHNIQUE TO THE SACITY AND BEYOND, THROUGH THE REPETITION!

Speed can only and should arrive at Dancesport as a result of control and mastery of the technique.

DIDACTICS AND METHODOLOGY IN THE PIANO´S WORLD

I will start by trying to explain using what happens with the practice of piano.
Imagine a piece of high speed. For example, the Revolutionary Study of Chopin, in C minor Op. No. 10.

It is an EPIC piece, highly complex, mainly due to its high speed. The composer said that Tempo should be ALLEGRO CON FUOCO !!! Alegro with fire! (It is called Revolutionary because the author transmitted in the piece his willingness to support the Revolution of the Polish Cadets against the Russian authority in which he could not participate because of his health problems).
The complexity of the piece is to play it at such speed, taking into account also that the protagonist of the piece is mostly the left hand that has literally “to fly” with millimeter precision playing dozens of notes in fractions of a second.

The Musical Tempos marked by a composer in a musical work, from slow to fast, may be the following:

Largo 40-60 beats per minute (usually black (quarter) note).
Larghetto 60-66.
Adagio 66-76.
Andante 76-108.
Moderato 108-120.
Allegro 120-168.
Presto 168-200
Prestissimo 200-208.

Chopin’s piece, being ALLEGRO CON FUOCO, is within the maximum range of ALLEGRO, that is, over 168 blacks (quarter) per minute.
Normally a Pulsation is equivalent to the duration of a quarter note in a compass. The Revolutionary Study of Chopin is written in a Compass 2/4, that is, each compass lasts 2 blacks. And if we look at the Score almost all the notes are SEMIQUAVER (Semi-eighth notes)
In one minute of ALLEGRO CON FUOCO, 84 measures, 168 blacks, 772 SEMIQUAVERS notes.
This means that approximately 11-12 different notes per second are pressed with different fingers!

For their learning, good connoisseurs of the learning methodology know that not only do they have to learn at low speed. You have to “FASTEN” the learning also at low speed and repeat and repeat hundreds of times until you generate “an independent finger memory” in the fingers of each hand, an “automatic and precise automatism”.
Low speed is for example half, 168 would be 84 blacks per minute.

Evgeny Kissin, great russian concert pianist, always betting on the best technique refined since childhood, when he already gave concerts and highlighted

(Piano: Evgeny Kissin. For me one of the best perfomances of these piece).

In the second phase, that speed must be increased slowly:

The next week’s trials at 90 speed always starting at 84 the first few times.
The next week to 96 always starting at 84. And so on until reaching 168 several months later.

But the piano players know that even if they are able to play the piece at maximum speed, they should always try it at low speed and play it only a couple of times at maximum. Why? Because the repeated practice at maximum speed messes up the interpretation in the medium term.

DIDACTICS AND METHODOLOGY IN TENNIS WORLD

Not willing to extend too much.
But I am going to refer here to another important collateral aspect in the development of children as future tennis players and we are going to draw an analogy with the development of dancers in Dancesport.

The importance of the technique at early ages.
Tennis is a technical discipline, but in my opinion less than the Dancesport. The difficulty of tennis is to “adapt” body to an external element: the ball. Although for different types of hits (drive and backhand) and subtypes (cut, flat, topspin), and several kind of grips, finally only 4-5 are the “hinges corporations that have to adjust to accommodate the ball and perform the chosen hit”.

I sincerely believe, however, that in Dancesport the number of “body hinges” is much greater. Even some of those “hinges” are almost unknown in the movements of a normal life. The  Dancesport BIOMECHANICS is extremely complex.

Therefore, I consider that DANCESPORT is the most technical discipline of all the sports I know.

Like all competitive sports, children want to win, parents want their children win, but coaches want to train future champions. However, they are pushed by the “resultadist dynamics”. And many of them give in and allow the young players away from the technical purism in order to get good results instantly: win the games.

In fact, until 10-11 years playing competitive games, at least very often, it is worse than better, because to win you end up hitting the ball in a less orthodox way, moving away from the technique that is less still entrenched in the boy.

-Bread for today, hunger for tomorrow-.

The purified Technique is the only KEY or GUARANTEE that the advance in a discipline is infinite.
Only the refined technique will allow the more you train the better you play.

When a tennis player for the sake of winning forgets to hit with the correct technique even if he fails, he will win that match and many more in the next few years, BUT A MOMENT WILL ARRIVE AND THERE will be no evolution.

However, other players who lost but who continued to invest in PURISM Y TECHNIQUE, will reach that level and surpass those who bet on RESULTS and will see them years later “through the rear-view mirror”.

In the present, International Dancesport has recognized worldwide the dedication to the refined technique naming Latin World Champions to Armen Tsaturyan & Svetlana Gudyno (main trainer Ilya Danilov) and in Standard dances to Dmitry Zharkov and Olga Kulikova.

ILYA DANILOV Video-Interview: INTERNATIONAL TOP LATIN TRAINER

Both couples are from Russian school, strongly characterized by betting on the most refined technique and working hard from early ages. That’s where the quality of dance and results comes from.

DANCESPORT & TECHNIQUE

In DANCESPORT, in my opinion, the same thing happens.
In early phases it is ESSENTIAL TO BET FOR THE PURISM, BY THE TECHNIQUE.
Since you start dancing with 4-5-6-7 (Juvenile) years until you are at least 16 years old and you reach YOUTH the priority should be “sow and then collect”.

However, in most cases it is not like that.

As DANCESPORT is a competitive sport and you want to win, young dancers tend to perform movements with great energy and speed, without realizing that SPEED MASKS TECHNICAL FAULTS AND PROVIDES THEM AT A TIME.

We see many parents excited about their children seeing “the amount” of dance but not the “quality”, because not only do they not understand it, but as a consequence, they are not able to see it. And they encourage their children to make an effort by dancing “loud” “fast” and if it is with “special effects” then better yet. “Bread for today, hunger for tomorrow”.

At early ages it is impossible to combine speed and energy, with technique, quality and precision in movement. And it happens just like in the world of tennis. There comes a time that no matter how hard you train, for many hours that you dedicate to it, you will reach a level from there, there will be no possible evolution: bad technique makes further progress impossible. You have reached the border of your capacity because of your lack of technical qualification.

Other dancers in their initial stages, perhaps pressured by the parents or environment, before learning the basics begin to exaggerate the postures and gestures (special effects). It is something that anticipates what is substantial and what makes the focus lose.

I have to admit that I have fallen as a father in that temptation sometimes, but I have the great good fortune to have a son´s teacher who has even more clear than me the principle that I am proposing.

I am aware that in some  competitions we have won some couples who danced with a lot of energy (Latin) or that fell more than us but they dismounted up and we did not (standard) and I have not gotten it well, but thanks to our coach we are beginning to collect the fruits of these appropriate didactic and methodology. Be patient, run away from the speed of the moment and bet all the chips of the casino by the Technique. So the future can be yours. Thank you Valera Zaiko for having it so clear and so methodical with my son!

Alex Gascón & Alexandra Zaiko, several times Spanish juvenile and Junior 1 champions and several International Open WDSF Latin & Standard champions.

If you are parents and want the best for your children as dancers of Dancesport, my advice is that you invest everything you can in good teachers and classes.

by Frank Gascón

Next article I will try to investigate and write about “The Ages Learning; Phases”.