With the past few routines my wife and I have done, we’ve only worked on our choreographed routines every other week. As such, I tend to forget what choreography we learned the last time we were working on it. To help work around this, we started recording the sessions with my iPhone. Since I’ve been watching Dancing with the Stars this season, I got the creative itch to publish some of these early videos as a “behind the scenes” look at how the routine comes together.

This is our first recording of our choreography. It is just starting, so there are quite a few kinks to work out, even in the very beginning of the routine:

This video shows the first time we put together the transition out of Cha Cha back into Hustle. Moving from Cha Cha to Hustle is a little easier since the syncopated Hustle basic is a 3 count basic. Cha Cha has a more sensitive time structure such that the “Cha-Cha-Cha” occur on the last count of the measure. (i.e. “four-and-one”)

Here is what the ending of the routine looked like at first. This was the final transition, out of Hustle and back into Cha Cha. You’ll notice that this ending has fewer patterns in it than the final version does. When we put the whole routine to music, we found that we were ending on a very “low” point in the music. To compensate, we added a few measures of patterns that we were already familiar with to end the routine at a higher point in the music.

Finally, here is a run through we did just before dress rehearsal. Follow along the left side of the screen to see annotations I’ve added for which dance we are performing at that time. If you watch carefully the ending, and compare it to the final routine we performed the following Sunday, you can see what the ending was supposed to look like. We are still kicking ourselves for not “sticking the landing” the day of the performance.