Carol McLean said:*How important is hopping as an Artistic skill? *
It depends on the nature of the performance. If your act has a flowing,
horizontal style, hopping is less important than if it has an energetic,
high-variety style. For example a typical top Japanese freestyler uses
very little hopping, while a Ryan Woessner might seem naked without
it.
Quoted message said:*Would these all be mandatory skills that every Artistic rider has to
do? Are these skills as important as one-footing and wheel walking in
Artistic? *
No and no. However you seem to maybe be blurring the line between
Freestyle and other forms of "artistic." I assume you are thinking in
terms of skill levels, but skill levels can only be guidelines to what
makes a good Freestyle performance. A good Freestyle performance has
*no* mandatory skills. You should be able to take any given trick out of
a truly good performance with little or no damage to it.
Are they as important as one-footing and wheel walking? Again for
Freestyle my answer would have to be n/a. It's all about what you do
with it and how you execute it. As for a more anaytical approach, such
as Standard Skill, just take a look at the points. I'm not looking, but
I'm assuming hopping moves generally score quite a bit lower. Part of
this is because they don't use up circle or 8 time, but also because
they tend to be not as hard.
Always remember, hopping on a unicycle is easier than riding it. If you
don't believe this it's easy to prove with a bunch of non-riders. If you
show them how to hop when they're learning how to ride, they'll get the
hopping almost immediately. I learned this in the 80s with school
programs. Due to the quality of the (more affordable) unicycles of the
time, the school had to forbid the kids from hopping because they were
bending cranks before they learned how to ride!
Quoted message said:*Also, would an advanced hopping skill be more or less important than
an advanced idling skill (such as crank idling)? Which skills are
better in a performance?*
I'd say neither is better than the other, but generally hopping skills
are going to be easier. It's easier to make corrections when hopping
than idling, depending on the trick. As to which is better in a
performance, the question is too general. It all depends on which
variations, how they're executed, and the overall nature of the
performance.
--
johnfoss - The wilder Wilder
John Foss, the Uni-Cyclone
"jfoss" at "unicycling.com" -- www.unicycling.com
"Read the rules!" -- 'IUF Rulebook'
(http://www.unicycling.org/iuf/rulebook/) -- 'USA Rulebook'
(http://www.unicycling.org/usa/competition/)
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