Country Dancing With Anita Williams; Steppin' Country

In our continuing search for good country line dancing instructional video­tapes, we found a couple good segments on what are basically music videos, and a whole boxed set of bad instruction. Country Dancing With Anita Williams offers five half-hour instructional videos (The Three-Step, The Two-Step, The Cowboy Schottische, Country Classics, and Line Dancing) with Director of the National Association of Dance Instructors Anita Williams doing more exhorting than teaching, and three extra couples on the floor adequately serving as clutter. We watched The Three-Step and Line Dancing. On The Three Step, Anita and son John promise the audience that "we're gonna do some boot scootin'," and demonstrate the very simple three-step followed by a reverse turn, a double reverse turn, and a few other goodies. And in Line Dancing, the duo teach "four" line dances: "Pigeon Toe/Four Corners," "Kickin' Country," "Cowboy Waltz," "The Walk," and "The Louie" (apparently they're using a different form of math). In a nutshell, here's the problem with this and many similar dance instruction videos: oodles of editing and simple dance instruction don't mix. We counted an upper body shot, a lower body shot, a full body shot, shots from the right and left, overhead shots from the right and left, and a moving dolly shot. One would have to be familiar with Einstein's relativity theory in order to be able to orient him or herself in physical space according to what was shown onscreen. Throw in three other couples on the floor to confuse the issue, put the two principals in the same shade of black pants (for those excellent contrast shots), move the camera way back so you can photograph all the couples, and you've done just about everything you can to ensure that people will not learn how to dance from your tape. The tech credits on the series are excellent, and those who just want to see some folks "boot scootin'," and listen to some C&W, would probably enjoy these; but it's not good dance instruction.The Steppin' Country tapes offer an interesting headache for catalogers: the two tapes are identically named but one is on the "Columbia Music Video" label, while the other is on the "Epic Music Video" label. Each tape has 4 music videos, followed by an instructional segment. The "Columbia" Steppin' Country contains: "Down at the Twist and Shout" by Mary Chapin-Carpenter, "Wild Man" by Ricky Van Shelton, "Rosalee" by Stacy Dean Campbell, and "Get in Line" by Larry Boone (the last repeated for the instructional dance demonstration of "The Boonewalk"). The "Epic" tape features: "Honky Tonk Attitude" by Joe Diffie, the deeply philosophical "I Want You Bad (And That Ain't Good)" by Colin Raye, "Big Heart" by Gibson/Miller Band, and "Blame It on Your Heart" by Patty Loveless (followed by an instructional segment on the "Sweetheart Schottische" set to Gibson/Miller Band's "Texas Tatoo"). Although the C&W music videos look like a simplistic version of MTV, the two dance instruction segments are good, using unbroken full-body shots.Country Dancing With Anita Williams is not recommended. The Steppin' Country tapes--which are mostly music video--would be popular additions to the music video collection, and are recommended. (Available from most distributors.)