I’m really excited about a recent class series Jess and I taught in the weekly Edinburgh classes. This series combined music styles ( and idiom dance/movement to those styles) and elements of partnering. We wanted to share the thinking behind it, and the limitations, and see if you guys have any thoughts or have previously tried something similar.

Goals

We wanted to promote differentiated dancing to differentiated music and get away from systematically having step-touch as a basic. But we also didn’t want to have 4 straight weeks of doing dances that might not apply to the majority of songs during a given DJ set (sets with no country, only one or two latin, or relatively little shuffle are fairly common).

We also wanted to address some basics of partnering. When we’ve taught this kind of class in the past, we’ve often done it in a fusion-y idiom-dance-neutral kind of way. I think that leaves the partnering basics kind of “exercise-y”. Alternatively we could do them in a “related set of moves” kind of way, but that rather over-promotes moves and doesn’t focus on how these basics of partnering apply the whole time.

What we did

So we tried out a combination of focusing on one music style and one element of partnering every week, with the hope that seeing the element of partnering in a very specific context would help rather than hinder transfer to other contexts, and the hope that dancing primarily idiom-dance-specific movement to only one music style for a class would rub off. We ended up with

  • country blues and clarity of weight/axis transfer
  • rumba blues and using counterbody and contrabody alignments for manoeuvring in closed position
  • shuffle and differentiating between “mirrored” and “parallel” body shapes
  • jazz blues and using tone matching for speeding up/slowing down and for leading/following weight shifts

To some extent we purposefully chose a partnering element that worked well with the movements we would do to each music style. But there was also an element of arbitrariness. This arbitrariness became even stronger when we rejected an exercise related to the partnering element because it had no easy application to the idiomatic movement for a dance style, or worse, when we rejected an idiomatic movement because it didn’t pertain to the element of partnering we were working on.

We worked in a music first kind of approach, going more broadly into various idiomatic movements in the beginner class (first hour), with a smattering of partnering technique and then recapping those movements in improvers class (second hour) before delving more deeply into a few specific movements and related partnering technique.

Takeaways

Our least positive takeaway is that we didn’t really enjoy the arbitrariness of just sticking to the one music and the one aspect of partnering. So in future we might do something like “one music, several aspects of partnering” or “one aspect of partnering, several musics”, maybe still limiting to only 3 or 4 of each over a 4 week series. We also wondered if the students would be able to take two completely different things away from a class or whether it muddied both aspects (idiomatic movement and partnering techinque) so that they took away neither.

We had few true beginners in class so whether the beginner/improver strategy for these classes worked is still untested, but we quite liked the resulting class plans on paper (though it did feel like the improvers were getting rushed through the idiom movement recap). In particular, the idea that we can teach differentiated idiom movement to beginners and use that to theme drop in classes seems like a net win provided it’s framed in a way that there is some coherence within the blues umbrella (basic rhythms, rolling of the foot, some kind of pulse, etc.). In this way, beginners who attend multiple classes don’t feel like they’re learning something completely different each week. It’s also nice to set up the expectation of improvers that the basics of blues idiom dances is something they should be familiar with (though we don’t want people to feel excluded either, especially if they’ve had not previous opportunity to learn these dances, or if they would do both classes but are short on time/cash - so we always made sure to teach idiomatic movement from scratch in the “recap”).

We really liked that, when teaching partnering skills, it makes so much sense to embed these skills in something more meaningful than “generic partner dancing” or “some set of moves that have this skill in common”. Even in the case of leading the difference between slows and quicks, which is technically similar in most dances, the feel of them with different pulses will be quite different and make them worth placing within a specific dance style. Rather than make them less applicable in other situations because we hadn’t seem them in a generic situation, it made them feel more transferable.

I’d like to work through why I think that “technique in a given dance style” would be more likely to transfer than “technique in a set of related moves”. I think it’s that the dance style context is more obviously independent of the technique itself and that moves sometimes have to be relatively complex to be both new enough to teach for their own sake, and to make the partnering technique essential for their success, so we spend less time actually teaching “the context” (whether move or idiom dance) and more time on just “the technique”.

Conversely, when teaching idiomatic movement for a given music, or a specific idiom dance, it’s difficult to not want to touch on all the things and to be patient with the fact that complex layered movements will not be acquired in a single class. So when teaching shuffle, we were able to focus on just tchoo-tchoos without feeling “guilty” for not going into sailor shuffle or fishtail with triples or Chicago triple. I also think it conveys a greater complexity to idiom dances to think of them as not a specific thing you take a class in, that is a kind of novelty item and be like “I’ve already done shuffle”, and that only a select few ever get good enough at this thing to do it on the social floor. Instead they’re a thing that everybody can be expected to have acquired the basics of, much like every Lindy Hopper knows a swing out and a tuck turn and a sugar push. So the pairings of shuffle and musicality, shuffle and pendulums, shuffle and polyrhythms, shuffle and isolations all become possible.

I also think this makes idiom dance/movement classes less overwhelming and less scary. Rather than have “we barely touched the tip of the iceberg and we spent a full hour doing it”, we can focus on a small specific part of the iceberg and only have it occupy a third of class. We can then spend the whole rest of class practicing doing the idiom movement, while also working on other things. This worked particularly well with tchoo-tchoo shuffle. Where we were prepared (from previous experience) for people to find tchoo-tchoos tiring and difficult to do in a relaxed way - and so had planned to move on to other movements fairly quickly - we spent over half the class working on lead/follow technique while simultaneously practicing tchoo-tchoos.

What next?

Our experience of this style of class/series structure was both positive enough that we wanted to share, and just uncomfortable enough that it felt like we needed some reflexion to figure out what we wanted to keep or do differently in the future.

I think in future classes that aren’t specifically about a music style or idiom dance, we’ll be much more intentional about the musical style/dance idiom contexts we are working in, either sticking to a single style or idiom, or intentionally exploring “let’s see what happens when we’re dancing shuffle vs latin when working on this concept”. Hopefully this is also a way to promote more blues idiom dance without exclusively doing classes specifically about them.

I think we’ll also give greater attention when teaching idiom dance to ensuring there is an additional class focus, both to lessen the load of spending a whole class working on new movement, and to also teach skills as being specfically transferable to other blues dances or other dances in general.

Last, focusing on two things in class and trying out new class planning strategies left us with less time and head space to have students solving problems on their own, which is also something we want to incorporate more of in our classes and will be our next challenge.