No, no slight pause. There is no cue before the arm setup because you really don't need it. For all the followers know, is that you will just be doing arm sweeps with floreos. The set up is your indicator.

Maybe there is some confusion about the idea of "set up" and "cue"? For me, ATS isn't so much "cued", in the way that, say, Unmata's improv is.

For instance, in the Unmata combos I have learned, most everything had a lead in move of some sort. Say, you do 8 basic egyptians, and the arms flow from overhead to the side...THEN the combo officially begins. Then you do some hip bumps as a filler, 8 counts of hip bumps with the arms flowing into another position is the cue...THEN the next combo begins. The way I have learned their combos in past workshops, the cues are somewhat separate from combos which are separate from filler moves. Kind of three distinct families of movement, each with their own role in the process of improvising.

For me, ATS is more organic, in that simply moving into the move ITSELF is what tells you what you're doing next. When I am going from an Egyptian into a hip bump, my arms changing from overhead into position 1 and my body line changing from an angle to more forward isn't a "cue", though those physical movements are what indicated the change. It is by simply going into the move, and the subtle and sometimes not as subtle changes in arms, footwork, body alignment, gaze, etc, that communicate my intention.

Some moves have more "set up" that others--that is, more obvious, less subtle movements and gestures which communicate that move--but really those set up gestures are in themselves also *part of the move*, not a separate cue per se.

So for me, the two terms are interchangeable, but the "cue" or "set up" for me is rarely a separate concept from the move itself in how I look at the moves.

This was a key difference for me when I came to ATS as a basis to work from. In my beginning work as a tribal dancer, we often would think of elaborate ways to cue into and out of moves or combinations, and the result was a choppier way of moving and approaching musicality. It made it harder to make changes on the fly to appropriately honor the music, because things were always so stringently set up in blocks of a set count of cues, then a set count of movement, and sometimes even a set count of "outro" movement--something to get you out of the combo and smoothly into another concept. We would sometimes find ourselves working with "dead air"--long strings of boring and monotonous "thinking movements" while we waited for the perfect set of counts to come up so we could fit the next concept we wanted to present into the music best. It lacked flow.

The cornerstone of ATS movement philosophy, for me, has to do with the seamless flow from one movement to the next, which comes from having "cues" or "set ups" integrated very thoughtfully into the movement vocabulary. It is something that can be confounding when I am trying to work in new movement ideas, because it will succeed best if it conforms to this philosophy or else it will feel choppy--like we hopped out of our usual dance vocabulary for a moment, did something different, and then popped back in again.

Am I way off base in the way my brain is working on this one?