I know about but not how to dance. These are impressions of an unskilled amateur dancer.
A previous post may have left the impression that learning and executing the basic principles of lead-follow partner dancing are easy. They are not! Learning the principles can be very difficult. Mastering these principles is absolutely necessary but nowhere sufficient to learn lead-follow, two-partner dancing. It is just the foundation. There are many other layers to learn. This difficulty is compounded by the learning environment that many students find themselves in . . . commercial dance studios.
Commercial studios are not like University dance degree programs or “legitimate” dance schools. Commercial dance studios are retail businesses selling “dance products.” There is nothing unethical about the vast majority of dance studios. Just like any business, they will try to sell you what they have in sock and they will always try to “up sell” you. In a ten year period, I spent thousands of dollars at commercial dance studios and learned very little about lead-follow dancing. But, I was a happy customer because it was a fun way to get healthy exercise and a great social experience.
Many commercial dance studios can teach two-partner, lead-follow dancing but you must know what it is and demand the studio teach it. This is a bit of a “catch 22” at first. You don’t know what you don’t know. It is also much harder to learn lead-follow dancing than to consume the other fun and less demanding dance products offered by many commercial studios. Studios often discourage lead-follow dancing and some don’t offer it all because they know it will be too difficult for their clientele. It is much easier to sell healthy exercise, fulfilling social experiences, enhanced self image and so forth. How do you know if you are being taught and learning the real deal? The same way you know if you are learning any other sport. Just do it.
Just do it like you would if you were taking tennis lessons. You test your skills by playing tennis with other tennis players. It would be of no use to test your tennis skills by playing basketball. Similarly, you can’t test your waltz skills by dancing cha cha or test lead-follow skills by doing performance choreography. Playing tennis with players that are much more or less advanced than you is not useful. There is no test of your skills if you can’t return a single serve of an advanced tennis opponent. There is also no test of your skills if a less advanced player can’t return any of your serves. Also, you cannot properly test your tennis skills with a regular partner or your teacher. How do you know they aren’t just lobbing you easy ones to make you look and feel good. You don’t know! The same is true of dancing. Dancing with a variety of partners that have levels of proficiency similar to you will yield better results than dancing with only one partner or any number of partners that are much more or less proficient than you are.
Finding players with similar levels of proficiency is much easier for tennis and nearly every other sport than it is for dancing. Nonetheless, if you are persistent, you can find appropriate partners and dance venues to test your lead-follow skills. For some (not me), this will be the chaos of large social dances. For others (me), this will be with individual or small groups of select partners in more controlled settings.
The difficulty of finding appropriate partners is again compounded by commercial dance studios. Social dances along with competitions and performances are products that studios sell to make money. People buy these products for all sorts of reasons. They have different interests in and abilities to perform all kinds of dancing. How many will be a good match for you to test and perfect your dance skills? Studio sponsored events work well for some but not so well for others.
More dancing.
