In my free time, I make myself available to help instructors at a dance school here in the city where I live. I’m something of a utility player: I dance both as a leader and as a follower, depending on what’s needed. On one occasion in particular, while I was dancing as a follower, a guy told me I dance better than many of the girls in the class. Although his was a compliment, I believe that comparing fellow students reflects a “wrong” mindset in dance courses.
The intent of that observation was clearly to pay me a compliment; poorly masking a certain dissatisfaction with his classmates’ abilities. It’s not very common for a guy to dance as a follower, since this role is constructed and still “reserved” exclusively for women – I’ll discuss this in my next article about gender stereotypes in Salsa.
What I want to focus on here is instead the mentality.
Making comparisons between fellow students’ skills is fairly common. We live in contexts where we’re exposed to competition in everything: from sports to school/university grades, in job hunting and even in partner searching.
In social dancing, in my opinion, this mindset should be abandoned in favor of a collaborative mentality, oriented toward sharing and participation.
The point of social dancing is to have fun and socialize, not to be the best. Dancers’ skills deserve recognition as the fruit of commitment and sacrifice, but in collaborative contexts they shouldn’t be compared: the true value lies in the contribution each person brings. Certainly, therefore, the presence of highly skilled dancers is precious; in a community context, it’s valuable to the extent that they know how to use their repertoire to make others have fun too.
The point of social dancing is to have fun and socialize, not to be the best.
For this reason, I believe participating in social dance events is more enjoyable when done with the spirit of relaxing and having fun, leaving your ego at home.
This principle is even more important during dance courses.
In these places, we’re all there to learn, even those who are already good. Everyone needs to practice and improve, and this happens by practicing with everyone; each with their own “style” of leading and following. This way, everyone learns to modulate and sensitize their technique in relation to others.
For this reason, I often reiterate that it’s very important to choose dance schools where partner rotation is very frequent, as I discussed in the post about the Rotation Method, so as to favor each person’s ability to adapt to ever-different partners; which is then the essence of social dancing1 .
Dance schools offer an optimal environment to practice toward this goal, since every difficulty or misunderstanding occurs under instructors’ supervision; the latter can provide their feedback, based on their expertise and experience, thus facilitating communication.
As is normal, each of us prefers a certain leading or following style, usually the one we’re most accustomed to. This doesn’t make it the “most right” one, but simply the one that makes us feel more comfortable. The ability to adapt to one another consists in being flexible so as to know how to move and dance virtually with any dance partner.
In social dancing, I believe it’s important never to lose sight of the objectives. When dancing with many different partners, it’s normal that things work better with some people and less well with others. But ultimately, this is precisely the point of connection in dancing: adapting to one another, especially when there are strong differences.
In the most extreme cases, dancers have a very rigid idea of dancing, pushing toward a “right” style (their own) to which the other must therefore conform. I don’t believe this conformist-minded mentality favors socialization nor makes the dance experience pleasant for both; I believe instead that it makes it only frustrating.
To the guy who paid me that compliment, I responded with a thank you; to you readers, I suggest looking at dancing with this perspective, collaborative, avoiding judgments and comparisons that don’t help your classmates and that hide the possibility for yourselves to adapt to whoever might struggle more.
1. Those who tend to dance in less varied contexts, i.e., always with the same partners, easily end up isolating themselves even at social dance events, dancing only with friends from their circle. This is entirely legitimate. In this blog, as you know, I instead address those who experience social dancing with a spirit of openness and socialization.