USO 2016 Update #4 - Competitors on Preparing For The Open

Focus, people, focus! Let's stop talking about dumb things nobody cares about.

Like elections.

Let's pay attention to what really matters...

The Open!

Just 33 days away!

What is it like to be a competitor? What's it like this last month, preparing to put your routine on the US Open floor?

A few competitors weigh in and give us a glimpse into their process.

Music choice, choreography, practice strategies, costumes ... and the meaning of the US Open.

MYLES AND TESSA

I found Tessa in a rare free moment at home, packing for Boogie and talking to me on speaker at the same time. Lot of drawer-slamming, hanger-sliding, and phone-rattling thuds in the background.

"I'm worried about forgetting that ONE thing. Like the only belt that fits Myles' pants loops. It's like walking out of the house without your charger cord - you have your computer, but it's useless because you forgot the charger cord.

"So ... Open Season! Myles and I have been together for so, sooo long now, with so many trials and errors, that we've finally settled on habits that work for us.

"I'm a school teacher, so for me September is not only Open Season, it's also "back to school" month. So we plan our practices for after-school hours. I might have school all day, go straight to the studio to practice, then we teach some lessons, and then we're home by 8 or 9 at night. Myles is a bouncer and works nights, so we have opposite hours. He'll run errands, go to the gym, and then meet me at the studio. On days where we're not working (we both work only part-time, just to keep one foot in "real life") we'll wake up at 11am and go to sleep around 4am - those are our regular hours.

"We start looking for a song in earnest right after Summer Hummer. Between Summer Hummer and Boogie we do choreography - that's our particular cycle. Occassionally we'll only start choreography after Boogie, but that is scary, really high pressure for us. This year we did it right, we got a nice early start and have been able to get to the studio quite a bit to work.

"I almost always have a costume idea even before we find a song. I use fashion trends, figure-skating, sometimes ballroom costumes - I get inspiration from all of these. I have a bit of a "curse." I don't consciously go hunting for fashion ideas, or take ideas off the runway. I just kind of let what I see inspire me. But for the last six years every single costume idea I've come up with, literally two months later some element of my costume is the style statement appearing at shows and in stores. It's completely accidental and unintentional. Like the year we did "Ants Marching" with the military costumes - that year everything was military. The year we did "Let's Get It On" - our pink tiered-lace? - that spring everything was pink tiered lace.

"I've actually done lots of fashion "consultations" for friends and dancers - personal shopping, costume and style design. I love fashion. I've considered going back to school for it but I'm not very good at sketching - I think that would hold me back. I'm also not very good at sewing. I've considered it though.

"We're lucky to have Myles' mother, Micky Munroe, as our costume seamstress. We share a duplex with Myles' parents so my fittings are right upstairs, very convenient. I've used costume designers from the figure-skating world, ballroom, and one year a designer for cirque-de-soleil. But there we're a small, low-priority customer. With Mom we're the Top Priority Customer. That's much better.

"With music we try each year to do something completely different than what we did the year before, both or our own inspiration, and because we feel it's important to show our diversity as dancers, that we can do different styles and genres. We don't want to just be camping out in our comfort zones, we want to be challenging ourselves, cross-training in different genres. Last year's "Don't Stop Me Now" is lively and bright; the year before, "Fix You," was exactly the opposite. You can guess what this year's routine might be!

"So we come up with the genre first. Then we think about what movements feel like they're missing in our dance; or what movements we feel we are missing, as in "it's been a long time since we've moved like that." These factors then dictate our music search.

"Next Myles cuts the music while I make a spreadsheet of the choreography. Then we head to the studio and start plotting our lifts. At this point we've done all our research and found all our sources for our lifts; so we start by plotting them, like a map. We can't always do them yet, but we talk about where and how they will go. Then we build the rest of the choreography around the lifts.

"Right now, in these last weeks, we're focused on perfecting lifts and on overall refinement. It's a nice, stress-free way to approach it which every year we say we're going to do but this year we've actually done. For us, we work in two-hour chunks. We've tried four-hour chunks, and one-hour, and found two-hours works best for us. And we're practicing as many days as possible, usually every day. We only know how to manage this, by the way, after years of doing it wrong many times first.

[Silence. All background noises suddenly stop. The phone's gone dead. Or Tessa is standing in the closet. Or Tessa is about to strangle a TSA Approved Luggage Lock.     Or I've inadvertently insulted her and she's hung up on me.   Oh no wait ... here she is, she's back ...]

"I will mention this:

Myles is DEFINITELY not the same style of learner as me. I am DEFINITELY a DIFFERENT style learner.

We've had to try many different methods to find what works for both of us.

[Laughing. We are both laughing. I'm familiar with this problem.]

"You know it's funny. Years ago, when I was a kid, a psychic came to our school and walked around the room taking a reading from each student. This woman put her hands on mine and said, "You're a teacher." I was in my rebellious phase so I said, 'You gotta be kidding me. This lady's a quack. I'll never be a teacher. I hate teachers. Teachers are stupid.'

"Lo and behold ... look what's happened! I'm a teacher! That psychic hit the nail on the head. I feel like my entire life has been focused on education, coaching, and teaching. I didn't know it at the time but it turns out I was made for this. And I love it passionately.

"The Open is so different than other events. It's more romantic. The Open - with its formality and celebration - feels like something that West Coast Swing deserves. Our sport should have more "officialdom" than it does, like other sports and art forms. It should be more widely publicized. It's important for us to represent ourselves out there as a culture.

"I saw that Benji is doing this new 'US Open Congress' for the first time this year. I think that's just an awesome idea! I think anything that establishes and defines, our dance, celebrates its place in the world, is awesome. We don't do enough of that.

"I think that our past generations have used the fact that West Coast Swing is fluid, and evolving, as a bit of an excuse to not define it, to not 'progress' the dance. With the result that west coast swing has kind of fallen behind in terms of having an established 'place' in the world of culture. I see a lot of other art forms exploding now on social media, having a greater presence and better organization. West Coast Swing is just kind of coasting.

"So the Open gives our dance more presence, formality, and legitimacy. It widens our exposure and visibility in the world. I'm in favor of that!"

KEVIN AND AGGIE

I spoke with these two happy faces on Skype.

Two very, VERY happy faces, on a brown love-seat in an empty room, beaming so cheerfully at me and bouncing up and down with such enthusiasm I thought they might bounce themselves right off the couch in London and bounce out of my monitor into Washington DC.

Rising Star competitors Kevin and Aggie Town have got to be the all-time cutest most adorable couple ever. They smile non-stop, giggle at everything, finish each others' sentences, rustle each others' hair, jostle and kiss and lean all over themselves like puppies at play. They are so modest and unassuming you would never know they're seasoned competitors, instructors, and pros.

Aggie: "We debuted this routine first at the UK Championships - that's kind of like a mini-US Open for the UK."

Kevin: "We're SO EXCITED to be going to the Open! It's our first time! We're really really excited and happy!"

A: "This is only our second West Coast Swing routine - we come from Modern Jive where we've done many routines, for years now."

K: "We started working on this one December of last year, just after last year's US Open. We both work full time, so practicing is really hard. We get home from a long day at work, get a quick bite, and off we go to the gym like zombies with Starbucks coffees in our hands, trying to be nice to each other."

A: "For us, the music comes first, and it dictates our choreography. It takes us quite a lot of time to choose. This time it took us about a year."

K: "We're really fussy."

A: "We need to both LOVE it."

K: "And we don't always agree"

A: "So to find the right song, it takes us a while."

K: "We've pretty much loved every single song we've ever chosen."

A: "As for choreography, for our Modern Jive routines we have always done our own choreography. But for West Coast, because we're still new at it, we wanted to make sure it was swing choreography, had enough swing content."

K: "So for the first routine we asked Gary and Susan for choreography. They gave us a skeleton, bare minimum, mostly structure and concept, which we then worked on to make it our own. And then we take it and make it as much "us" as possible."

A: "For this current routine we got our choreography from Jordan and Tatiana. We haven't changed much, only small stylistic changes, or maybe a move that might be considered a Jordan and Tatiana "signature" move. We don't want it to be super obvious that this is Jordan and Tatiana choreography ... "

K: "Every champion has their own way they do a movement, their own recognizable style. We don't want to look like a bad copy of someone else."

A: "Like for instance a syncopation in a pass or a whip, or an arm placement, or maybe a subtle change in timing that would be noticeably Jordan and Tatiana's style."

K: "Especially for Jordan and Tatiana - their style is so unique because of it's contrasts."

A: "It's hard to find your own style, your own 'voice.' It's taken us a little while, to know what our style is."

K: "When we're not just messing it up."

A: "But we want to make sure that we have enough swing content, that it is clearly a swing routine, not Modern Jive. We wouldn't want to be penalized for it not being proper swing, for a mistake we could have easily prevented."

A: "At this point, where we've been dancing it now for a few months, we are only changing it here and there a very little bit, stylistic changes mostly."

K: "This is a bad time for UK dancers to be travelling anywhere, much less overseas. Because of Brexit, problems with the EU, political uncertainty. It's not good for us now, our currency status is in free-fall."

A: "Travel to the US is so expensive for UK dancers. The price of flights to America. The long hotel stay, too. It makes the whole trip very expensive, not affordable for most UK dancers. We're lucky, we bought our plane tickets last year, just after last year's Open."

K: "In Europe we have two events (at least) every weekend. So we don't have to travel to the US anymore, to find great events or great pros. Or high-level social dancing."

A: "Ourselves, we're getting used to travel because we're being hired to teach all over Europe and this past year in the United States, too. We were just at Desert City! We were thrilled - we love teaching."

A: "As for costumes, Kiley Evans, who did Jordan and Tatiana's costumes, did ours as well this year. She's amazing. She does amazing work."

K: "We're feeling both excitement and apprehension about this year's Open. Our dream was always to put a routine on the US Open floor. Such a PRIVILIGE to be able to do that! To travel all that way, and then be on the floor with all those amazing couples!"

A: "One word:   Very.   Scary."

K: "We have a panel of friends, dancers from a few genres, one very into blues and blues dancing, a small group of close friends we use as our 'consultants.'  We ask them about music, outfits, choreography even."

A: "For coaches we've used quite a few, to make sure we learn from everyone, get different input. We like to learn how different coaches work, how they see and explain things. We get coaching from Jordan and Tatiana, Gary and Susan, Kyle and Sarah for general/social dancing, Maxence and Emeline, PJ Turner."

K: "We're Just so excited to see all these routines put on the floor! Rising Star especially because it's been such a supportive friendly welcoming division for us."

A: "We can't believe the Open is almost here! WE'RE SO EXCITED!"

STEPHEN AND SONYA

Sonya: "For us the song makes the concept and the choregraphy.

"This is our third routine together. We chose our first song, "Limit To Your Love," because it's a song I used to hear at the little place where I would go to have breakfast three times a week. They would play it all the time there and one day I finally asked "What is this song?" Stephen and I listened to it and it was like, "This song. This is the one."

"Last year was pretty easy too. We considered a few choices, but then Stephen made me listen to 'Making Whoopy' and I was like 'Yes, this one. For sure.'  "

"This year was different.

"Stephen got injured in February. So we couldn't do our Showcase routine. We had to change the routine to be able to dance it in Classic.

"And we had already chosen a song to begin work on our next Showcase routine - we'd already had it cut and remodeled, it was all ready to go. But then it became clear we'd have to plan for dancing in Classic at the Open, not Showcase, because even if the injury would be healed by November, it still would not have healed in time for us to practice. We had already choreographed half way through but we said, 'This is not working. This is not a Classic song. This is not Classic choreography.' "

"We decided to scrap everything and start from the beginning.

"We talked to Jordan because things were just not working, the creative process was not working, and we needed help.

"Jordan said, 'I might solve all your problems in two minutes. I have a song for you.' And he made us listen and we were like, 'Oh yeah. That's it!' And we made everything over from scratch with this new song.

"We learned a lesson from this experience, from Jordan, in the midst of our troubles earlier this year. Jordan said, 'If you're not BOTH 100% on board ... SCRAP EVERYTHING.' He said, 'People think it's terrible if you scrap a routine after all the work and time you've put in. But you must. Better to scrap it at the beginning instead of having to abort two months in, when you've already put it on the floor at a bunch of events.' "

"So this was at the end of August, when we scrapped everything and started back at the beginning with a new routine. Very late for us.

"In September we rehearsed at least five hours every day. Event or no event, sleep or no sleep, we rehearsed. We're still pretty exhausted from that. We've mostly finished choreography at this point, except for small things we want to tweak. We're waiting for the costume. Now, in October, we have only one week where we are not travelling, so basically have one week this month to rehearse. Then November will be crazy for us again - we'll be in France working with all the crew. So we won't have much time at all to rehearse in November, right up to the Open.

"We will have at least presented the routine in Montreal - it will be a rough draft with a lot of flailing around.

"As for costumes, that's been difficult. We had someone from Montreal the first year but she let us down the second year, a month and a half before the Open she decided she wasn't interested. We had Laura Mackie make us costumes on an emergency last-minute basis.

"This year we have someone new from Montreal. The concept drawings look great so we're hopeful.

"That last week before the Open we're mostly just trying to breathe and survive. We're being careful of our health, watching energy levels, and most of all trying to not kill each other.

"This year will be strange for us. We're used to doing Showcase where we dance on Friday and then everything's done. This year we'll be watching on Friday.

"For us the Open is COMPLETELY different than every other event. First of all, we don't work. There are a few couples who teach or do workshops that weekend, but most of us are not working at the Open. We don't do much social dancing, either, at the Open. I don't care if I don't social dance at all, all weekend.

"The Open is like the beginning of the 'fiscal year' in the sense that we all know that what happens at the Open is going to influence how you are perceived for the rest of the year. All your contracts, your income for the year, your travel schedule - all that is basically determined at the Open.

"Until now we've danced in Showcase where the atmosphere is fun and friendly. I don't know if it's true, but we've always heard that Classic is more competitive, more tense, and maybe less friendly than Showcase.

"The really cool thing though - maybe this might have been an undercurrent these last few years - is how everybody's saying there's a new mindset this year - we're actually thinking of putting out a "statement" of some sort about this. We want to make public our interest in encouraging and supporting each other, our fellow competitors.

"It's like there's a really cool vibe out there. It feels inclusive and warm and real. Good solid relationships between competitors and working dancers. It feels really good. Really really good."

GLENN AND PATTY

Glenn:  "For us it's all about the song. We were lucky this year because we found a song early on that we both fell in love with.

"We always find the song first, and the music dictates the choreography.

"Some songs you have to get talked into. Because sometimes you have to think strategically - you're not just picking a song that you love to dance to. The song has to work.

"Especially for me, coming from hip hop. We know that it's important for us to choose a song that is clearly swing, to show that I understand swing and can dance to music that very clearly swings.

"Last year's song - we don't like it. Neither of us likes it. Don't get me wrong - we like dancing to it. And I think it's a good song for us, and it makes people smile. But when Patty first heard the song she said  'I hate it.'  So do I.

"This year's song we both love.

"Right now we're focused on getting the main skeleton of the routine together. That's how we like to work - we get a rough pattern of everything first, and then fill in the gaps later on. Some couples like to choreograph bit-by-bit, but we do the rough draft first, the overall structure from beginning to end. And then we fill in the details afterwards.

"With our first routine, at the Open a year and a half ago, we tried to be very creative. We had different moves, different styles, everything just to make the routine really "different." Straight away afterwards many people gave us their opinions - we asked for this feedback. Our mistake was that we listened to all the opinions, and tried to do every single thing every person had said to do.

"We ended up not being ourselves. Obviously we respect everyone's opinions. And there are people we look up to incredibly. But we took the comments so seriously and changed so much that neither of us even knew what the concept was at the end.

"You do get a lot of advice, and of course it's all meant to help. But that experience taught us that if you follow every bit of advice you you get, you end up changing the routine so much that you lose yourself.

"The Open! It's nothing like other events.

"It's COMPLETELY different, completely.

"I only came properly into the west coast swing community a year and a half ago. It was all new to me, and the importance of the Open was hard for me to understand when I first got there last year, just how different it is. Completely different atmosphere than anything else all year.

"It's funny because I'd already been to an Open. I danced with Brandi at the 2006 US Open. Few people know or remember that it was me who did that. But what's funny is I don't remember any of the stress or nerves then. Maybe you get more nervous as you get older? Or maybe I'm just taking it more seriously now.

"But going to the Open last year! It was really something for me. Totally different than anything I'd ever been to.

"It was like ... like no other ... it was just ... people practicing everywhere... every moment of the day, every hour of the night... people practicing in small ballrooms ... everywhere you went in the hotel people practicing... In the halls, corridors ... Those floor trials at 6am ...

"The Open dictates so much for the rest of the year. The people who go to the Open take this seriously. They want to win. There's a competitive attitude. There's a respect, an excitement, that's different from any other event."

TONY AND LARISSA

I found newlyweds Mr. and Mrs. Tony and Larisa Tingle Schubert snuggling, bickering, and giggling together on the couch in their home in San Diego, still recuperating after a long day in their respective day-jobs ...

Tony: "So this is our third routine together. Benji has done our choreography for this routine, and the last one, too."

Larissa: "We got really into the story with our last routine, and Benji helped us develop this routine as a continuation of our story, the story of our lives. Happy song, happy choreography, happy costumes, happy routine."

T: "We start looking for a new song right after the Open. It takes us several months because we're really picky. It has to be a song we like, has good energy -- we have a lot of criteria."

T: "So it takes us a long time to find a song. And then we have to agree on the song."

L: "Part of the problem is that I'm a deejay. I go through so much music, and I feel like there's so much I want to dance to. I'm always sending songs out to friends, to other couples, saying I want someone to dance to this. But it always seems like no song fits us."

T: "Or she'll come up with five options that she loves and I'll veto all of them. It's always a long process."

L: "This year's song, 'Extraordinary' by Clean Bandit, I found several years ago (even before we found last year's song, 'To Build A Home.') I played it for Tony, he listened to it once and said he didn't want to dance to it. And then I played it for him again last year when we were looking for a new song and suddenly he loved it. He said 'Wow! Never heard this one before!' and I was like 'Yeah, no, you've heard this many times.' "

[massive bickering and giggling on the couch]

L: "So there was a lot of back and forth for a couple of months. Sending the music to Benji to get his input, and whatnot. We finally settled on it and started choreography in April just after City of Angels."

T: "The Monday after City of Angels."

T: "This year was difficult because we were also juggling plans for the wedding, and Larisa's mom's death, taking care of her estate."

L: "Plus we were still performing our old routine for another six events, all the way through Summer Hummer of this year. So we had to keep practicing that, too, at the same time that we were working on the new one."

T: "We got the choreo in April with the plan of debuting at Summer Hummer. But we got so caught up in wedding plans that we decided to push it up and instead debut at Rocky Mountain 5 at the beginning of September."

L: "The weekend before our wedding."

T: "But then Larisa got sick. Really, really bad kidney infection. And had to be hospitalized. So we decided to debut it at Boogie again, like we did last year."

L: (laughing) "It was just chaos for a couple of months. But it all worked out. We think debuting at Boogie is a good pattern for us, we'll probably debut there for the next foreseeable future."

T:  "It works out because between May and October there are only a few NASDE events, or events that even have Classic, where we actually have to do a routine. There's Grand Nationals, then Swingtacular in August, and this year Summer Hummer. So we have four months where we don't have as much to do which has made it our prime time for working on new choreography."

L: "Neither of us handles stress. For our own sanity we've decided we want to debut BEFORE the Open. At least for the next several years. The Open is stressful enough to begin with. So for our relationship's sake we decided we need to put it on the floor before the Open, to take some of the stress off of us."

T: "We work with really good coaches. Like Michael Kiehm. We'll have him come around when we practice, just to make sure we don't kill each other. Not as much this year, but last year, during "To Build A Home," because it was such an emotional routine, and the choreography was so difficult for us. So practices were hard. Michael Kiehm was essentially our referee. He would just hang around the studio, and if he heard us get to loud he'd come out and yell at us and make us do a run-through. And then we'd cool off and be able to get back to work."

L: "So we've gone to Benji twice now. Both times we've had the goal of growing as dancers, so we've asked for choreography that is hard."

T: "So hard that it's choreography that we can't actually do. We asked for that."

L: "So it takes us a little longer than it might take another couple, because we can't DO any of the choreography on the day of, as we're getting it. We're not just learning choreo, we're learning how to actually execute movements which are new to us, and seem impossible. He makes it really hard. So we can't do a 'rough run' even just to see how it sits on our bodies. We have to grow so much before we can even get to that point."

T: "For our relationship's sake we've come up with a plan where we designate practices for certain things."

L: "We've agreed beforehand on what we're going to work on."

T: "So we'll break the routine into 'chunks.' Different parts - either thirds, or quarters - and then we'll go into practice saying 'Let's work on parts 3 and 4 today.' So we don't make the mistake of focusing all our attention on one part and not addressing the rest of the routine."

T: "Then when we start to become a little more fluid with it, we'll try putting it to music, and try identifying the count, and what hits what in the music."

L: "Benji will give us something that is just a pure creative moment. Choreography that is not fully figured out. He'll give it to us that way on purpose, just a concept, which he leaves to us to bring to life. So we might take a practice to focus on one of these moments. To figure out what it feels like in our bodies, what it feels like, what we want it to be, what we might learn to do on the spot."

Liza: What's the Open like for you? Same as other events? Different? What's it like to be an up-and-coming Classic couple?

T:  "It's miserable"

[lot of laughing]

L: "It's the best weekend of the year. It's also the worst weekend of the year. It's the best and the worst at the same time."

T: "It's the most rewarding weekend of the year for sure. But it's the most miserable. For our first routine we were practicing seven hours a day, right up to the point that we actually danced in Classic. We were just so exhausted."

T: "Then again last year, same thing. We were practicing seven hours a day right up until the week before. And last year we had injuries. So we were trying to recover from our injuries but still practice."

L: "Ugh. As it gets closer and closer it starts to sink in the whole magnitude of it."

T: "When people ask what the Open is I tell them it's like our Olympics."

L: "I always say it's the Olympics meets The Academy Awards. It just means so much to me, and I don't have the words."

T: "I feel ... so ... I don't know ... Our whole dance career we grew up as dancers watching routines from the Open, hearing about the Open."

T: "This will only be my third Open I've actually been at. I've been dancing seven years now. For me the Open is what made the 'Greats' - the Open was the event that formed our dance, it has always seemed to me."

T: "So being there, not only just to be there, but to actually PERFORM! To dance against people I've idolized and been awkward around my whole life! It's just ... just ... it's really cool. But a lot of pressure."

L:  "Yeah, and this year we especially feel a lot of pressure because we got such a loving, emotional response from our last routine. From people we knew, from random dancers at events, from strangers who'd want to come up and talk about it and share their own stories. Because the routine was so personal and touched people."

L: "So we feel pressure, like we want to connect with people again, we want to make art like that again."

L: "It's like a pressure we feel to contribute back through our dancing, pay it forward, to give back to the community."