This is another fine production from Christi. It's hard to critique any of Christi's tapes, because she is in a class of her own in terms when it comes to very complex step tapes. She raises the bar with every tape. How the woman comes up with entirely new moves every single video is a mystery to me. She has a gift from "heaven."

Others have broken down the content of the tape. All 3 sections contain fresh choreography, with no repeating the moves from the previous section. The first section is moderately advanced choreography, that's do-able, even if you stumble a little towards the end.

The second section is a whole 'nuther story. It is mind-bogglingly complex in many places, and the step is turn vertically, giving you less stepping space, but more room to integrate step moves with floor moves. Christi starts right off the bat with this "scoop off the step, mambo around move" that it took me the longest time to get. I think it's hard because the turn is fairly fast, and you switch feet, all while turning off the long end of the step. I think this move shows the limitations of learning really complex steps on video. With the t.v., you miss the 3D perception to figure out which way the turn is executed. It's probably much easier to "get" in a live class. The first move lays the foundation for the rest of the video, so if you screw that up, you're toast. My advice to folks learning this is to just stick with the basic variation that Christi shows in the beginning. Don't even bother with the turns and other shennigans the first time around. If you're a Taurus like me, you'll get frustrated that you can't even get the first move, and then call it quits.

After the mambo-scoop move in section 2, things go ok, but then Christi has you do a 360 degree turn on the step that immediately lands into a straddle and "walk the board." I have to be *very* careful with that move, because you're turning 360 degrees on the *narrow* part of the step.

You later proceed to the last few combos. I think Christi's teaching on some of the later combos got a little tedious on moves that are, in my opinion, among the easiest in the tape (i.e., the charleston-scissors move), which is odd, because you hardly get any introduction to the more complex, spinning moves.

My overall impressions of this tape: I think it's a good tape, but for some reason, the tape begins to feel laborious to me by the last 10 minutes. In all honesty, I think that I pretty much had to memorize most of the moves, because you really can't anticipate the next move and get it right without virtually *knowing* what's coming next. You get muscle memory, and then you can execute the moves on autopilot, almost.

We've kept ranting to Christi since 7002 that we want less breakdown in her step tapes. Well, we got it this time. Many of the harder moves in this tape are not broken down at all. You get a "watch me" and that's it. In that respect, I'd say that teaching-wise, this tape is along the lines of Patrick Goudeau's more complex tapes. Comparisons between this one and the step in CIA 9801 are inevitable. I did both back to back, and I must say, I prefer the flowing pace of CIA 9801 more, for some reason.

Eulonda Skyles