The things we let beginners believe

When I first started dancing, I thought dancing was about putting my feet on the ground in the right place at the right time. This difficulty was compounded by having to think about my partners and where their feet went. It took quite a while before someone told me (or I figured out) that I was almost totally wrong (I started with Breton dancing, where putting your feet and arms in the right place at the right time misleadingly appears to be the name of the game).

Different people come in with different assumptions about what dancing is about, some of which are based on ignorance of dance or on beliefs that do not transpose well from other forms of dance. Classes tend to make matters worse because you need to learn one thing at a time, so they introduce their own misconceptions and frequently don’t address existing misconceptions (as in my case). Probably quite rightly - the last thing most beginner classes need is more talking. But if not then, when are they addressed? Randomly at workshop weekends, informal conversations, …? How does what is said (and not said), done (and not done) in classes affect what beginners believe?

Anyway, here are some of the things (mostly about Lindy, but some of them also apply to Blues, Tango and Folk dancing) that beginners might believe which are, at the very least, contrary to how I think about social dancing. Obviously, all of these are also partly true, given the right caveats. For most of them, I wouldn’t want to “fix” them altogether, but at least make beginners aware early on that things may not be as they seem.

Dancing is about stepping on the right foot in the right direction at the right time

This is a commonly held belief about all dancing: you have to know the “steps” or “the basic”. We reinforce this belief because typically, the first thing we teach is to count out the music and to step on the left or right foot on a given count.

However, dancing is about moving your whole body to music. The feet are a huge component, helping to mark rhythms, and of course being attached to the legs and the rest of the body, not to mention being a major focus of what lead and follow should achieve (i.e. stepping together¹), but what you do with your feet is only part of the story. The main thing is to move your whole body and let your feet follow, which in turn will also help with leading and following.

Where the foot falls also tends to be part of the description of movement: e.g., “step left on 1”. In order for this to happen, the whole body needs to start moving some time before that (8 or 8.5). Thinking of where and when to step will get in the way of this.

And the “right direction and right time” suggests there’s a wrong direction or wrong time. There is wrong for what you’re trying to achieve (including dancing to the music) and wrong because it’s not honest movement but otherwise there is no wrong.

Lindy either goes step step triplestep step step triplestep or step step triplestep triplestep

The general idea that dance has a basic step pattern which you should adhere to is related to the point above. It’s what most people believe, and it is frequently what is taught in the first lesson, since getting this in muscle memory will free the brain to think of other things in future lessons.

The teaching of a basic step pattern also alleviates one of the problems inherent to leading and following: both partners stepping on the “same” foot at the same time. Although perhaps a necessary evil, following a pattern gets in the way of creativity and of learning to lead and follow weight changes,

However, Lindy can be danced in any number of step patterns, which can be led or left to the discretion of the follow. If there is a pattern, the most discernible one is that you come together with a “rock step” or “step step” and end apart with a triple step (or whatever sets you up for the next rock step).

The lead should micromanage the follow’s footwork

Following the realization that footwork does not have to follow a pattern but can still be led, leads tend to then focus on leading every. Single. Step (and expect follows to follow them to the letter - or risk being labeled an incompetent or “misbehaving” follow). In certain circumstances, footwork can definitely be strictly led or followed, but there are other options:

• When in open position, the follow can mirror the lead exactly or can insert any number of substitutions - or even hit a break the lead didn’t hit.
• When in closed position, the follow can insert transparent (or translucent, in that they can be felt but do not disrupt) substitutions in many cases, particularly if the lead leaves some freedom.

More generally, the lead should not constantly micromanage the follow’s anything. You don’t need to hit the same variations at the same time when in open position. Dance is a conversation and the follow is not a puppet, or someone to be harangued.

Social dancing is about creating an on-the-fly choreography of moves

If you learn moves instead of movement, dancing appears to become lining moves up, one after the other. This is kind of true. If you look at two people dancing, they look like they are doing a sequence of moves. You could even rattle them off: swingout to open, swingout, j-turn, into tandem charleston, into hand-to-hand charleston, side pass, lindy circle… – but there is so much more happening. The countless subtle ways each move can differ in executed movement: footwork, energy, groundedness, dynamics, trajectory, start and end positions, etc. And then there is the matchup with the music, the phrasing to hit stretches, breaks, hesitations, and so on.

There is also the question of when you choose the next “move” and how ready you are to abort it. Sometimes it’s planned ahead of time, allowing you to finish the previous move in a position which best prepares for the next. Most often, I select movements which flow into each other, by seeing where I am at the end of one pattern and instinctively moving onto something from that position. I personally find it unnatural and unmusical when I think “I want to go into that variation I learnt last week” several counts ahead of time.

The follow needs to know a move before they can follow it

This is one of the problems of move-centric classes that don’t give enough to the follows. If the teaching isn’t clear, follows may think they are learning the same thing the leads are: where they should go at what time. Not only does this create follows who are baffled when something new happens, it also creates follows who follow through with the move they think was led, regardless of the actual lead.

Moves must be signaled or communicated

This is related to the two points above. As Nathan Bugh explains, you don’t actually communicate moves. There is no collection of hand signals that say “this is about to come up” any more than you have to use your voice to say “here comes an inside turn with a double spin”.

There is body movement, which creates connection, which in turn suggests new movement.

There is a correct way to dance OR There are no wrong moves, only variations

Any claim that “you must” or “you must never” is a prime candidate for critical thinking. Even the best teachers and dancers are sometimes misguided in their claims (though they are also often right, at least considering these claims as a rule of thumb). The claims then tend to get amplified by students eager for clear answers. “For this class, don’t do this” becomes “never do this”.

The opposite proposition, “There are no wrong moves, only variations”, has some merit, but some movements physically hurt, do not respond in a reliable way to a given led movement or do not reliably distinguish between led movements that are intended as different. While (to borrow a phrase from a friend) nobody should tell you how to have fun, if you are taking classes, you are to some extent allowing that teachers will have ways they will try to get you to move which they consider better than others.

In Lindy, the follow comes in on 1 (or 2, 2.5, 3, etc.)

See above. The follow should come in when they are led. And the lead should lead in at a time that matches the desire of the follow. All counts have merit.

In Lindy, the lead should let go on 5 (or 4.5, 6, 7 etc.)

See above.

How we look is important

Although dance is a visual medium, social dance is much more kinaesthetic - how your partner feels, how your own body feels.

Competitions and performances overemphasize the visual aspect (seen from a perspective of social dancing). This leads many teachers and critics to talk about creating strong lines or interesting shapes (those with a modern dance background might add the notion of the spaces and volumes that are created).

For a long time, I tried to completely deny this aspect. But then I realised the other side of the coin: natural, comfortable, simple movement will look elegant and beautiful. So I strive for simple movement with the assumption that looking good will follow.

There is a strong idea that we should be wary of only optimizing a signal of the thing we want to improve rather than the thing itself. Artificially fixing the signal (does it look good, could it look even better by creating a nice line?) may not fix the underlying cause: the dancing is not natural and efficient.

You have to master the basics before tackling more complex stuff

This is a very persistent myth, along with its cousin, “You have to know the rules before you start breaking them”. These beliefs seem to come from Western middle-class culture. We are obsessed with the idea that there are rules to everything; that these rules can be expressed, studied, taught and learnt; and that mastery of a subject requires declarative knowledge of these rules. Music, photography, language, dance, etiquette, writing, running, skiing… no domain is safe. For some reason, we believe this despite such obvious evidence as even 6 year-olds being able to form complex feats of syntax, semantics and pragmatics whose rules the vast majority of adults are unable to describe.

I’m not saying there aren’t rules², but a) they tend to be very hard to describe with words and b) even when they can be, they might help us learn faster, but I’m not sure they help us do better. It is also by placing rules in context and seeing what works that we learn. So I find it unlikely that it is possible to learn the rules without breaking them (both unintentionally, through not knowing better, and intentionally, to experiment with the boundaries). (Note that this is different from being disinterested in learning the rules in the first place.)

But even if these rules were expressible, and even if they did help us learn faster and better, the idea that we should learn basics before moving on to other things assumes that it is possible to learn some curricularised subset of the rules (i.e., basics) independently of a wider context. Whether this is true depends on what it means to “have learnt”. As I argue in a post asking what basics we should teach, even advanced dancers are still working on their basics, so in that sense, if you wait until you feel you “have”, some basic before trying to do all the other fun things dance has to offer, you may be waiting a long time. But in order to know whether you have a basic down “well enough for now”, you have to put it into practice in the wider context, to know what your goals are and whether you’re meeting them³.

By not waiting to try out more than just “the basics”, you will realize that it will still take some time before you are able to do some of the more complex moves or movements, which in turn will motivate you to work on what is necessary for you to achieve those moves or movements.

Most dancers do things that are beyond their ability or outside the basics they are learning. Rather than feeling guilty or letting other people judge them for it, we should accept that it not only happens, but is practically unavoidable and is most likely beneficial to learning.

You are a beginner and dance is hard

Being labeled a beginner is reassuring. Often, people ask “How long have you been dancing?”. When you reach the 2 or 3 year mark it’s an uncomfortable question: you think to yourself “I’ve been dancing for this long and I’m still this bad at it?”. So it’s rather nice to have “oh, I’m a beginner” or “yeah, we’ll he’s a pro” to fall back on as a justification.

But most new dancers truly do bring a bunch of relevant knowledge to their first lesson. Knowing how to walk, some intuitive or explicit knowledge of music, a life of experience and things to say. Teachers who make students believe that they don’t even know how to walk are not empowering them to have confidence in yourself, or drawing effectively on their existing knowledge and placing them in the zone of proximal

Conclusion

Dance is many things to many people. Figuring things out may seem a bit like counting angels on the head of a pin, but it also helps us realise to what extent our assumptions are not universally held as true. For some, it may be liberating to learn in the safe certainty that our teachers have a plan that will end up beneficially for us. For me, finding out the myriad of different ways to approach dance, refining my own thinking and ignoring the aspects of dance that don’t appeal to me or that I think are downright misguided is the liberation to pursue my own inner dancer.