In last week’s post, I outlined a hierarchy of needs for West Coast Swing. The idea of the hierarchy is that competency at higher tiers is dependent on first developing competencies in the lower tiers.
The hierarchy provides a framework for understanding the sequence of skills required to achieve a musical partnered dance. It also provides us with a useful way to look at expectations and evaluations of competitive dancing. (more…)
I often talk to students about setting priorities. It can be hard to know what to focus on, especially when there’s so much to work on, and so many things we want to accomplish.
The thing is that certain elements need to be in place to achieve other elements. For instance, if you really want to be musical with your partner, you need solid partnership skills. And in order to have solid partnership skills, you need to have an understanding and control of your own individual movement. So the more musical you want to be, the more you need to understand partnership and your own movement. (more…)
In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of balancing your partner’s experience with your own in partner dancing. Because we’re partner dancers, it’s not enough to just think about ourselves. It’s important to be mindful of how our partner feels as much as we think about our own enjoyment. (At least, if you want people to enjoy dancing with you and ask you to dance…)
While sometimes people focus more on their own enjoyment, I find that a lot of the time things can go the other way: people can be overly concerned with what their partners want. They really want to please or even impress their partners, and they worry about boring them, displeasing them, or disappointing them. (more…)
We all want our dances to feel good. I mean, why would you want dances that don’t feel good, right? We do this thing called partner dancing because we love, seek, and even crave that great physical and emotional connection with someone else as we move together to the music. When it happens, it’s just pure magic.
But here’s the thing: it’s not all about you. As much as we want it to feel good for us, it should also feel good for our partners. After all, this is a social dance, and if it doesn’t feel good for your partners, then they won’t want to dance with you. Then no one feels good.
When I work with students, I speak of three objectives for partner dancing:
Of course, the first two objectives can be contradictory: what feels good to you may not feel good for your partner. Most if not all of us have had a dance where our partner seems very satisfied but it just wasn’t that good for us. Maybe the physical connection wasn’t comfortable, maybe we just didn’t click with our partner, or maybe we just didn’t have a fun time. Worse still, our partner may do something that makes the dance difficult or even painful for us – arm leads, arm follows, rough leaders, heavy followers, leaders who don’t pay attention, followers who hijack leads, etc. Sure, that person may be having a grand ole time, but the person holding his or her hand may be less than thrilled with the experience.
I understand the desire to do things a certain way in order to maximize your enjoyment. The problem is: you have a partner. If you were at a club dancing by yourself, by all means, go nuts and do what you like. But when you take someone else’s hand and create a shared experience to the music, it should involve at least a minimum level of respect for your partner and his or her enjoyment. You should at least want them to be comfortable, if not ecstatic. In this case, it isn’t about maximizing your enjoyment, but about optimizing for the enjoyment of both partners.
Welcome to any relationship.
So what’s the balance? How do we make sure we’re having a good time and creating a pleasant experience for our partners?
First of all, let me say this: you won’t enjoy every dance. At least, not to the extent that you may like. Not every dance is perfect, and truly amazing dances are not common. It’s our community’s unicorn: a magical being that is very rare and very difficult to conjure.
Similarly, it takes two. It takes two to fail, and it takes two to succeed. You could be doing everything in your power to make a dance work, and you may still not find the connection or the good feeling you’re seeking because, hey, partners. You both have to do your parts well to create good connection, to make the dance feel good, to make the magic happen.
That said, you should know your part well. You should be doing what’s good for you and your own body in a way that improves the partnership, not in a way that hurts it. Having proper posture, frame, movement, and timing will improve the connection and experience with your partner. If you’re doing something that you think is proper but it’s causing discomfort or an unpleasant feeling for your partner, then it’s not proper.
It’s funny, but I work with students all the time who do things they would never want their partners to do to them. In fact, when working with students who have bad habits or poor technique, I will often dance with them and repeat what they’re doing (though not anything painful or dangerous, mind you). After they experience their own unpleasant actions, they immediately want to work on correcting it. Some are even embarrassed, having not realized what they were putting their partners through. But that’s the point: we don’t always know what we’re putting our partners through. They can be gracious and even smile and laugh and yet they still might not be enjoying the dance because of something you’re doing to them. This is why it’s important to get good instruction that can give you the tools and feedback you need to create a positive experience.
Yes, I want you to have a good time. Dancing is about having fun and gosh darn it, you should have fun too. But remember that this is partner dancing, and so we should be balancing our fun with that of our partner. We should be thinking about what we can do to make our partners comfortable, make our partners smile, and create a positive, enjoyable experience for them. (Hopefully not at the expense of your own enjoyment, but I won’t lie – sometimes that may happen.)
The best partners are the ones who make you feel good – physically, emotionally, and in creating a fun, dynamic, and musical dance. Rather than asking that from our partners all the time, how about we try to be the partner who provides it? Then you’ll be the one everyone wants to dance with.
My last post about dancing to blues raised some interesting thoughts about the rhythm of the music we dance to. Regardless of the music’s rhythm, however, we should always have proper timing.
We all know the importance of timing. (Or at least, we should.) Timing by definition is the precise placement or occurrence of something in time, and in the context of dance, that means executing movement at the right time with respect to the music. After all, our function as dancers is to express and physically represent what we hear, so timing our movements to the rhythms and melodies we hear is critical.
Annie Hirsch was invited to speak with the Bay Area West Coast Swing Community last year at an event hosted by The Next Generation Swing Dance Club. During the interview, she was asked what in her mind defined swing. Her response? “Three things: timing, timing, and timing.”
And for those of you who compete, you know it’s the first of the Three T’s upon which you’re judged (timing, technique, and teamwork).
But what exactly does it mean to have proper timing?
When I taught syncopations to my students last month, we came upon the discussion of timing, and I framed timing in three ways:
1. Starting with a down beat. This is the obvious one. The music we dance to has an even number of beats, paired in a downbeat (accented beat) and upbeat (unaccented beat). We sometimes refer to this as the “boom-tick” sound in the music. The downbeat is the odd count (1, 3, 5, 7) and the upbeat is the even beat (2, 4, 6, 8). Leaders should always initiate new patterns on the downbeat. It’s proper timing and it just feels better.
2. Spacing your movements accordingly. This one is pretty fundamental. You can start with a downbeat, but if the time between your steps doesn’t match the time between the beats, then you’re dancing off time. The rhythm of the music needs to match the rhythm of your movements, and that means that your movements happen at the same pace as the music (whether it’s stepping or something else). I see lots of dancers who start with the rhythm then lose it somewhere in the middle of patterns, resetting at the start of the next pattern. You should maintain the rhythm of the music throughout your dance.
3. Dancing triples on downbeat-upbeat pairs. This may not be as obvious, but it’s still important for keeping proper timing. We break the music into two-beat increments: a downbeat followed by an upbeat (1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8). A double is two steps in one of these pairs, a triple is three steps in one of these pairs. That means that a triple starts on a downbeat and ends on an upbeat (1&2, 3&4, 5&6, 7&8) – not the other way around (2&3, 4&5, 6&7, 8&1). I often see followers tripling off time, and it’s usually because the leader prepped the follower on a downbeat so the follower was forced to triple through a turn starting on the upbeat. This results in that awkward fumbling of the footwork after the turn. If you want to maintain timing, you should keep your triples properly placed with the music.
Timing isn’t just something we teachers and judges pick on for fun. It’s essential to being a proficient dancer, for your own movement, for connecting with a partner, and for expressing the music. So make sure you’re always on time (in dancing and in life!).
How do you think about timing? What challenges do you face with maintaining timing in your dance? How do you teachers approach timing with your students?
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