On the weekend of 1 and 2 June, the mandatory judges' training took place. Thanks to the generous support of Barbara Stahel, who made her dance school time2dance available to us, we were able to hold this event in a very familiar and hospitable environment.
In Horst Beer, we had an extremely competent and likeable instructor who taught us the desired precision of movements in the basics of standard and Latin American dances with the topic of "Level of Energy", among other things. The feedback from those present was correspondingly positive and there was an explicit request for another visit from Horst - perhaps in a different setting, such as a coach training programme.
With our demo couples and also himself, he demonstrated movements, timings and much more in detail and embellished everything with anecdotes and experiences from his long career. The demo couples were Mikhail Pikulin and Yaroslava Chelombitko in Standard, Flavio Martins de Sá and Angelina Lesniak in Latin and Ivan Hadarah and Anastasiia Fedchenko in 10 dances. We would like to take this opportunity to thank them once again for making themselves available for this truly difficult job.
The low turnout of active couples and their coaches was somewhat disappointing, although we had repeatedly emphasised the possibility of visiting as guests. It is a missed opportunity to benefit from the extensive knowledge of Horst Beer.
Text and pictures: Gunar Haas
