Vertically challenged?

[etchuck]

So my dance colleague and I were returning to our hotel in Manhattan talking about the dancing from the Friday evening sessions, and we slid into conversations about the right height for competitive dancers. It appeared that most of the girls in the Latin scholarship final were around 5'0" (sorry can't convert to cm right now) and that it appeared the taller the woman is, the less it appeared "right" to do Latin. Whereas ballroom standard seems to emphasize line (and thus height helps you), Latin seems to demand the quickness and starting and stopping motion, and smaller women tend to do better there.

Just wanted feedback if these generalizations made sense.

[Sagitta]

How did the ladies compare to the gents? Perhaps as ladies heights increased the gents did not as much so the difference in lady and gent height made it feel more noticable. Was each couple dancing on the floor alone? A smaller couple will naturally be able to look smaller and more nimble then a larger couple.

[twodance]

When you are dancing you are producing lines in your body. A taller persons lines are longer and therefore mistakes show up easier. This is why shorter dancers show up better.

[SDsalsaguy]

etchuck, your observation fits the general trends. At BYU, for instance, your height will determine if you end up on the Latin or ballroom forumation team. Of course some of this has to do with generating uniformity for a formation, but the choice for shorter-Latin/taller-Ballroom still stands.

And, in the same vein, if you look at the average heights by style the trend definately remains... although it seems less pronounced in the American styles, at least to my eye.

[Sania]

However, I do think that tall people can be very successful dancing latin. For example, when Amateur Nationals were in Utah about three years ago, Max Chmerkovsky was dancing with Brigitta Elksne (both tall and slender) and they were stunning, both from a technical and a performance standpoint.

I've also seen small couples do very well in standard.

Sania

[SDsalsaguy]

Absolutely Sania... Massimo & Alessia or William & Alessandra both provide excellent examples of shortrer ballroom copuples uniformly regarded as among the very, very best in the world. As I said, as a general trend etchuck's observation holds... but it is certainly far from universal.

[dave_aw]

Then again apart from Michael Wentink and Beata, almost all the top latin pros are really tall - over 6 foot. I think Carmen and Hannah are both tall girls - I'd reckon maybe even 5' 6" or more!

[cocodrilo]

Aside from dancers, the latin persuasion generally tend to be small. All of my friends, with the exception of my former salsa instructor (Peruvian, 5' 9")
are much shorter than I am (5'8").

[SDsalsaguy]

Then again apart from Michael Wentink and Beata, almost all the top latin pros are really tall - over 6 foot.
Dimitry Timokhin & Anna Bezikova? :wink: