Molly McGown and Scott Herdegen taught a balboa class on tossouts. The tossout is a signature balboa step. It is sort of like the swingout of balboa. In Scott and Molly’s class, we focused on fine tuning different moments of the move.

We began by working on the extension, which happens on the 7. After the come-around, the lead begins shifting their weight backwards to create a stretch. We practiced maintaining rotational momentum so that the follow rotates over their right shoulder. This rotational movement creates the tension that makes the redirect possible. Since tension is created by the rotation, the redirect requires little force in the wrist, and little to no pull. Scott observed some leads using flicks of the wrist, and encouraged them to do less.

We experimented with different lines of redirection. Instead of the standard line, leads practiced changing the angle so the follow travelled straight towards the lead’s body, on an over-rotated line, and an under-rotated line. These different lines mostly felt awkward. Either the space was too close, and led to collisions. Or too long, and caused the lead to take bigger steps. Scott instructed us to try to keep our steps consistently spaced.

We then moved on to long-arm tossouts. Standard tossouts keep the lead’s left hand connected to the follow’s right. In the long arm, the lead’s right hand stays connected to the follow’s left. This results in a position that looks more open. Although it looks different, the same rotational force is used as in the standard tossout. It is a bit more difficult to create the rotational force, since the lead’s left hand can’t help guide the trajectory of the follow’s right shoulder. This may be a moot point, since earlier in class leads practiced not pushing with the left hand. So theoretically, the rotation should come from the through-the-body movement of the come-around.

At the end of class, Molly and Scott tried to “break our brains”. We let go of the extension on 7 requirement, and experimented with moving the extension later to the 8, or earlier to the 6. It was a challenging exercise.

During class, Molly and Scott alluded to chained-tossouts and sendouts. I had never heard a balboa “sendout” defined, but have been doing them without knowing I was. They are very similar to Lindy Hop sendouts. Chained-tossouts aren’t too complicated, but will take some practice. They require the lead to create a second moment of rotational tension on the measure directly after the first-toss out. These can be chained together infinitely.