Below is a YouTube tutorial I made for some house dance friends, showing them an exercise on how to not only dance on the high hat, but to transition between the kick, the high hat, and back to the kick.

I learned the core exercise from Walid, who taught a group of us the exercise during a workshop that took place in London. Though heavily inspired by his teaching, I made some changes that I think provides more clarity:

• Counting on the high hat – in the third set of pas de bourée, we’re dancing on the high hat. The way Walid taught us to count was “and one and, and two and, and three and” which is totally valid however, I’m counting it as follows “and one and, and three and, and five and, and seven and”, giving us (or me) a clear understanding of where I am at relative to the eight count
• Annotating with a piece of paper – during the workshop, there were no visualizations. So I added my own annotation (as you can see in the video)
• Adding my own interpretation of ending on on the 7 beat – Though we can immediately transition to the high hat from any down beat, I believe in the second round, the reason we end on the 7 beat and transition to the high on the “and” of the 8 downbeat is because 1.5 counts of “time” gives us ample time to prepare ourselves physically and mentally to transition

Exercise Description

Short version:

• Dance 8 counts of pas de bouree, starting on the “1” downbeat
• Skip the “1” of the second 8 count, and dance 6 counts of pas de bouree, starting on the “2” downbeat
• Start on the “and” of the 8 beat (from the last round of pas de bouree)