Dancing Backwards in High Heels and Other Problems in Animation

This paper addresses the problems of maintaining syncronism in time and space of a pair of dancing human figures in closed ballroom hold, one of whom is shorter but wears high heels. The hold requires the maintenance of five areas of contact between the bodies. A serious problem is 'rattling' from the difference in leg action between the partner moving forward and the partner moving backward. The movements have to be tightly controlled to avoid the 'stepping-on-partner's-toes' problem. The steps taken to try to solve this problem for two animated figures will be described, some animation solutions shown using the program LINTEL, and these compared with real dance demonstrations.