Social an couple dancing is open to everyone, and its philosophy is inspired by… socializing through dancing! You dance in couples, so it is important for the couple to establish a dialogue, i.e., communication and a relationship that is enjoyable for both partners.
The context of social dancing
When we go dancing, we know that we are all there, to a greater or lesser extent, to dance with lots of different people, have fun, enjoy ourselves, and express our talent through dance.
A healthy dance environment can be recognized when everyone returns home with a smile and having had a pleasant day, when invitations to dance are extended and received, when everyone feels welcomed by the community and “mingles” with the people.
Social dancing brings together people from different schools, different levels, different ages, and different abilities. Dancing in such diverse contexts is a very recent privilege: we must therefore accept that with some partners things work better and that other times we may not immediately find perfect harmony.
This is perfectly normal, because it is one thing to learn to dance at school under the guidance of instructors, together with your classmates and in a supervised environment, but it is quite another to “dominate” the dance floor while interacting with people who have had different training from us.
In the past, there was a lot of focus on dance technique, as that was the reason people attended classes; today, community spirit and sharing are more important values. We have therefore moved beyond the idea that there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to dance and know instead that a more inclusive approach is one in which dancers expresses themselves as they have learned and as they are able to move, and so we do.
For this reason, it is important to be open-minded, flexible in your dancing style, and accepting of differences, adapting to them and always remembering that responsibilities are shared equally between the leader and the follower. In this inclusive perspective, dancers perceive the pleasure of mutual dialogue, and this approach guarantees enjoyable dancing regardless of everything else.
Otherwise, when rigid patterns are applied, there is a tendency to mistakenly think that one or the other is at fault, or inadequate, or that things are not working “because of you”. This inability to adapt makes the experience frustrating for both, as you have surely experienced when dancing with someone who does their own thing; this is certainly not what one hopes for when going dancing.
Open-mindedness and technical flexibility are the result of working on yourself, both during classes and at social dance evenings. In class, which is where you learn to dance, you do so by practicing and keeping in mind that the movements, especially leading/following, are functional where they can be used in “real life” outside the dance school.
The ability to adapt and communicate with different dance partners is the result of this malleable approach and is what we simply call Connection.
An idea of connection that truly connects
After talking about it with friends and other instructors, but also thanks to some research on the internet -on Reddit, other blogs, social networks, and YouTube -I realized that we don’t all mean the same thing when we talk about “Connection”.
The goal is to be able to dance, virtually, with anyone. Having established this, I think it is important to clear up any misunderstandings and explain very clearly what it means to dialogue, listen to each other, connect, and dance together.
The essence of social dancing lies in its openness to dancing with different people, adapting to ever-changing styles, sensibilities, and levels of experience: each partner is unique, and so are their dancing characteristics. The ultimate goal, as I have already said, is to make the dancing experience as enjoyable as possible for yourself and your partner.
Dialogue is the manifestation of this philosophy, an expression of sharing and relationship in the context of couple dancing. Embracing this philosophy means using dance technique to foster connection and mutual listening. Simply put, Connection is a way of dancing together by adapting to each other.
In this regard, I would like to point out that many people confuse harmony – which is created by repeatedly performing the same choreography with the same people – with Connection, which is instead a way of dancing oriented towards couple dialogue and of which harmony is one of the many consequences, due to good mutual adaptation skills.
At this point, you may wonder whether your approach to dancing is more oriented towards performing and doing lots of complicated figures, or towards dialoguing with your dance partner…
The importance of a consistent teaching method
In recent years, at least in the last 15-20 years, the most common teaching model has been to convey movements through choreographies. Choreographies dominate the dance school scene today, and it is highly likely that many of you readers have learned to dance in a school that adopts choreographies, either in whole or in part.
This way of teaching undoubtedly has many strengths. Dancers, especially beginners, focus on imitating movements so that in each lesson they perform the figures and go home satisfied that they have learned something new. Commercially, it works because it is a win-win method and allows for a quick entry into the world of dance.
However, teaching movements through choreography has hidden costs, and it is essential to be aware of them. No matter how hard students try, as long as they limit themselves to copying their teachers, they will develop both choreographic perfection and the technical rigidity I mentioned earlier.
Students mistakenly believe that a movement is correct to the extent that it resembles that performed by instructors – who, with their feedback, actually reinforce this perception. The guaranteed result is that it becomes difficult to develop the technical and mental flexibility that is the necessary prerequisite for Connection. At more advanced levels, when the choreographic approach is deeply internalized, it becomes virtually impossible to connect with anyone who has not followed the same path.
Copying your instructors in the hope of becoming like them could easily be your goal. The important thing is that you are aware that your skill has no significant impact in a social context. It is an open secret, which even the best dancers in the world fall for, that dancing with people who only know their choreography means spending time admiring their stage performance. It’s nice, but communicating and dancing with someone else is something else entirely.
The goal of the “social” dancer is not the mechanical execution of movements, figures, and steps, but rather the mastery of the technique behind those movements.
The connection requires focusing on the technical component of the dance, so that with time and practice – not “everything at once” – dancers learn to master it, acquiring a sensitivity that allows them to easily adapt to any new partner. In addition to this work done during lessons, there is also practice in the dancing floor, which takes place by dancing in dialogue with as many different people as possible, preferably from other schools, cities, countries, planets…
Choreography is the enemy of social dancing
I have been saying this openly for years: choreography is the enemy of social dancing. It is also a trap that is difficult to escape from.
Through choreography, you get immediate results in terms of performance – because you just have to follow ready-made movements. You learn to do a specific movement, with specific people, with a specific result. Furthermore, when practiced repeatedly in class, these movements inevitably create a good rapport with your classmates – who already know what to do in advance – giving the illusion of learning and knowing how to dance well enough.
Choreography also includes all those fake style movements such as touching your hair, caressing your hips, etc., taught in some courses, which constantly break contact with your partner, making it unbearable to dance with those who perform them.
But this is only an artificial construction of movements: the technique is so focused on performing something spectacular, on movements that are “already written”, and not on listening to each other; dancers are deaf to dialogue with anyone else who does not know that specific choreography and blind to the messages coming from their partners.
I have seen these limitations in dancers of all levels, from beginners to the best performers in the world: those who do not develop dialogue are destined to be bad social dancers at any level.
Connection has nothing to do with the acrobatic movements seen on social media, rehearsed and rehearsed again: these are illusions that do not lead far. Connection has to do with the feelings, perceptions, and emotions you experience while dancing with different partners each time. A choreography studied and perfected over a long period of time with your partner will always be more elegant and precise than the first, clumsy attempts to make the dance work with someone you have never danced with before. But this is precisely the meaning and charm of social dancing: learning how to adapt to everyone!
Instructors who have been dancing together for many years obviously display enviable harmony, and this is their advertisement for dance classes. As is normal in a market context! The same market logic leads schools to hide their weaknesses, which in these cases are precisely the instructors’ ability or inability to dance while mingling with people.
If the instructors themselves do not master the Connection, it is obvious that they will not be able to pass it on to their students. For these reasons, I believe that students interested in the social side of dancing will benefit more from following instructors who regularly attend social dance events. But that’s not enough: instructors themselves need to dance with everyone, especially with students from other schools, demonstrating that they are familiar with the context in which their students, i.e. you, will then put into practice what they teach you.
I’m sorry if I’ve dampened your enthusiasm a little, but in this blog I prefer to tell it like it is. However, this does not mean giving in to romanticism, but rather accepting that illusions do not get you very far and that, in my opinion, they should therefore be abandoned.
What matters is that dancers learn the structure and technique behind the movements. It is not a matter of simply memorizing the movements superficially; it is a matter of understanding their origin and dynamics so that they can be performed from any angle. This is a long, sometimes laborious process that requires mastery of the fundamentals.
This way of learning may not be as fun as following the instructors’ spectacular movements and choreography, as it requires continuous practice of the same movements. It takes time! And for instructors, it is especially challenging when students (wrongly) believe that they have learned them sufficiently or know how to do them very well (lucky them!) and want to move on to the new figure, when in reality we know full well that they have only learned the basics of the basics, far from understanding the structure well enough to move on to the next topic.
Students must therefore also be taught that “everything at once” comes at a price and that rushing does not get them very far. There are no shortcuts in dance. For this reason too, as an instructor myself, I strongly support and sympathize with those teaching methods and schools that “take it slow” and encourage their students to go dancing often and to do so in as many different contexts as possible.
Instructors are therefore required to teach with great clarity and a touch of creativity, so as to structure lessons in a way that satisfies students’ eagerness to go dancing without losing sight of the core values of dance.
Conclusion
Dance is now a mass phenomenon, a consumer product, inevitably subject to market forces. As such, it is certainly not heading in the best direction, but rather towards the one that brings the greatest return for dance schools.
It should always be remembered that we take classes to learn to dance, but also to relax and have fun. For this reason, I believe that a valid teaching method is a healthy middle ground that strikes the perfect balance between what students really need and what they want to learn in a short time.
Connection, on the other hand, is a buzzword today and is therefore used as a carrot to attract students interested in dancing. There is no easy way for students to understand whether they are learning choreography or a reusable technique. It is therefore up to the students to take the initiative and ask for clarification on the technical aspects. They must do so insistently, check whether their school is transparent, and verify whether what they are learning is really useful for social dancing or whether it only works within their circle of friends. This is what you must do!
Once this point has been clarified, everyone can choose the path they prefer, knowing that they have embarked on the path that best suits their desires and expectations.
My experience tells me that many dancers want (and believe they have) mastered connection, but this is increasingly being lost.
More and more dancers are attracted to spectacular movements, performance, wanting to move acrobatically and “look good” without too much effort. The price to pay is that in doing so they blind themselves to the flexibility needed to keep the social dance community open, healthy, and lighthearted; a community in which these same people participate and in fact weaken it, closing themselves off in small circles of friends who interact little with those outside their circle.
Those who dance often find it advantageous to experience dance by valuing differences and adapting to each other. In partner dancing, we dance in pairs and are equally called upon to make the dance enjoyable for our partner: he/she is not there to do what we want, but dances with us to share something enjoyable for both of us.
1. For this reason, in environments poisoned and contaminated by fierce competition, schools aim for increasingly long and complex choreographies to send a message of supremacy: “we are the best”. In such contexts, instructors cannot dance freely with students from other schools, because they would risk being accused of scouting – a practice in which teachers dance with the hidden intention of attracting and directing students from other schools to their own school. This phenomenon generates further tensions, pushing schools to isolate themselves even more. In places where this phenomenon is present, and there are many, it is very difficult for students to learn connection at school, so they have to find a way to distance themselves from the toxic dynamics of these schools and open up to each other by dancing with each other despite the tensions of their instructors.
2. The latter are clarity of guidance and interpreting signals (“following” as they say) without forcing movements, the ability to listen to music and dance to it, and a solid and correct weight transfer technique – without disturbing the movement of the torso, which has now disappeared from dance classes. With a solid foundation, it is then easy to create anything, at any time, and with any partner. I would like to point out that the foundations always go together, and if even one of them is lacking, the whole dance will suffer.