What Partner Dance Classes Teach Beginners: It’s a Conversation, Not a Monologue
Partner dance is a conversation. It’s not a monologue.
When you join a partner dance class, you think you’re there to learn steps. But learning steps alone is like writing a speech and reading it out. You say the same thing whoever is standing in front of you, and it doesn’t add anything to the conversation. It takes “Two to Tango“. That’s what partner dance classes really teach you, more than steps.
Take any normal conversation. If the other person isn’t giving you anything back, you get bored, and after some time you aren’t even interested in what you’re saying yourself. It’s the same on the dance floor. The dance becomes more beautiful when it goes back and forth, and what makes it different each time is the other person and what they give you.
Partner dance classes: steps are only the grammar
Steps are the grammar. You need them, just like you need a language to talk to somebody. But grammar is only one part. Even if you don’t speak the same language as someone, you can still get your point across if you really try to connect with them. That human sense of connecting is the bigger part, and in partner dance it comes first. There are people who walk into a dance evening without a single class, and if they find it easy to connect with people, they can dance.
Without connecting, you each just do your part. One person pushes the step through, the other goes along, and the step happens. That’s just getting things done. Connecting is when you really find out who the other person is. Some people need very little: you show them a small thing and they take it and make it big. Some need to be shown everything. You see who is in front of you, give exactly what’s needed, and that’s when the dance becomes whole.
Tango is fully improvised. It isn’t one step after another, it’s one moment after another, and from any moment, anything can come next.
Partner dance classes for beginners: starting from nothing is an advantage
As a teacher, I find complete beginners easier to teach. In any partner dance you can get by without much connection at the start, and later you realise you can’t do without it. In Tango you can’t take even the first movement without it. Someone who has never danced learns to connect from the very first step, with no habit of getting by without it. If you’re open and ready to let go, you are my best student.
In the first classes you learn how to walk together, how to stand, and how to hold each other. Once you can connect like this, learning the steps is easy.
If you’d like to start with Tango, you can join the Tango Beginners Batch in Indiranagar. If you’d rather get a taste of partner dance without picking one dance, you can try Dive into Partner Dance in Jayanagar. It covers five Latin social dances (Tango, Bachata, Kizomba, Merengue and Salsa), and what you learn is the basic connection that is common to all of them, with the music of each. Either way, you are learning to connect with another person, without words.
