Something that has been bothering me a little regarding stance depth and foot positioning is the need for modification by people of widely differing heights and stride lengths.
I first noticed this with the 'taming the tiger' stance. As a man 6ft 2 in stature, if I sink onto my rear leg such that the thigh is parallel to the ground I find two things occurring. 1) that my body is still mostly the height of my lower leg above the floor, and 2) that if I stretch the forward leg out until it is straight and then rise into a bow stance that my stance is now very long and very deep.
Firstly, I realise that for this stance it is not necessary to crouch down so that the butt scrapes the floor - to do this would be to move the thigh below the supporting knee and I am not sure this is desirable. Secondly, for a tall person there is a far greater difference between 'shoulder width' and the foot positions of a deep stance than there is for much shorter people.
Is it acceptable to adopt both higher stances and deeper stances within the same form? What I mean is, taking a higher stance in say single whip (dan bian) and then, when sinking into snake creeps down (she shen xia shi) allowing the forward leg to extend or slide forward to facilitate a lower position in the crouch.
It makes me wonder if in fact taijiquan is more suited as an art for compact people. I realise that some of the great masters were giants of men, in more ways that one, but the question still begs.
I await you wisdom on this matter.
Monsoon