Ballroom Dancing

Ballroom dancing tips

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ballroomAgainst all odds, I picked up the hobby of ballroom dancing thirteen years ago.  I realize that isn’t the normal fare here, but I wanted to share a few tips.  I can’t teach you how to dance, but I have lots of suggestions on how to improve your experience if you try it.

  • Be nice to yourself.  It can be very humbling, especially in the beginning. Compare yourself to the dancer you were yesterday, not to those who have had hundreds or thousands of lessons.
  • Like all hobbies, this has costs.  The big-name studios like Fred Astaire and Arthur Murray tend to be more expensive and high pressure, though we had great experiences our first few years at a Fred Astaire studio.  The local studios tend to be less costly but still very good.  We’ve been going to one for over 8 years and really enjoy it.  But you don’t have to take lessons for life.  If you learn some basics and practice them, there are many low-cost dance venues you can go to.
  • Take videos of your instructors demonstrating the dances.  That has saved me countless hours of time and frustration because I quickly forget choreography.  Your studio may have a curriculum where you can go online and see the figures done from various angles and in great detail.
  • Don’t succumb to high pressure.  Our studio is great and just meets people where they are, but we’ve known of other studios that pressured people into spending too much.  Some just want social dancing, some want to compete, and some want to do “showcase” numbers.
  • Practice! Duh, right? Too often, I think I’ll remember a new figure, and then 15 minutes later, it is gone. So repeat them often until you have them wired in, then create amalgamations/routines of 8-10 figures and go through those regularly. You’ll remember them much better that way.
  • Ideally, if you have a partner, learn at the same pace.  I’ve seen disconnects where one partner is much more serious than the other, and it can cause friction.  Just have fun together.
  • Take advantage of group lessons. They are less expensive than private lessons, but you still learn a lot and get plenty of practice.
  • Aside from the physical benefits, there are proven mental benefits as well.
  • And enjoy rule of dancing: The man always leads and the woman always follows.  Your mileage may vary.

At the risk of appealing to your ego, if you learn a few basic moves in dances like the Cha Cha or Rumba, people will lose their minds the next time you do a little dancing at a wedding or social event. We dial our dancing way back at those venues to not be the center of attention, but it is fun for people to see you learning new things.

Again, I never thought I’d be an amateur dancer and do competitions, showcases, and social dancing.  It has been a great and fun way to exercise.  You don’t consider it exercise because you focus on dancing and having fun.  Mrs. Eternity Matters loves it.  We have had years of built-in date nights.  We’ve met lots of long-term friends.  We’ve learned many new genres of music.  And more.

8 thoughts on “Ballroom dancing tips”

  1. Very cool! I grabbed a flier in my condo’s mail-room for ballroom dancing. But, it was a bit more expensive than I expected. It sounds like a great first-date idea though.

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    1. Good point about costs. I added this to the post: “Like all hobbies, this has costs.  The big-name studios like Fred Astaire and Arthur Murray tend to be more expensive and high pressure, though we had great experiences our first few years at a Fred Astaire studio.  The local studios tend to be less costly but still very good.  We’ve been going to one for over 8 years and really enjoy it.  But you don’t have to take lessons for life.  If you learn some basics and practice them, there are many low-cost dance venues you can go to.”

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  2. One of my wife’s oldest friend had the opportunity to take dance classes with her husband through a local park district offering (as I recall). They invited us to join them for a regularly scheduled social event for class members and their guests, where their teachers attended and danced with most of them. It was way cool. Though I thought her husband appeared as if he was thinking every step and performing in a less than fluid and second-nature manner, that he was enjoying the heck out of it was beyond question. I had always wanted to do it, and this event spurred more interest on my wife’s part, but it had waned quickly for some reason. She’s evidently fine with just swaying together on the dance floor, while I’d like to take it a bit further. 

    On a related note, I always had an interest in tap. If I couldn’t get the wife to take dance classes, I wouldn’t be above taking tap lessons on my own…at least as far as my left knee and emphysema will allow. I have a simple goal: to be able to tap down a set of stairs the way Jimmy Cagney did at the end of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”. Then I’d be ready to die. :D

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    1. My wife is about to start taking tap lessons! I wish I could. The nerve damage from my 4th bout of cancer pretty much paralyzed my lower right leg. I can do other dances with a plastic brace, but tap requires a lot of ankle flexion. That said, I hope you take up tap dancing and let me know how it goes. It always looked like such fun.

      And Yankee Doodle Dandy is one of my favorite movies. Cagney was so amazing, and I loved the clever ending where the soldier asks if he knows the song Cagney’s character wrote, and then Cagney starts marching and singing it.

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      1. My lower limbs might have something to say about the notion, but I would like to do it. I also would like to do it on the sly, and then spring it on the wife and others. Getting the cash together without her knowing is impossible without having squirreled it away out of my weekly funds. But that would be fun. Just hit two years being here in SC, and I’ve no clue about where there might be a studio. It would be so sweet if there was one right next to the gun range less than a mile away. Then I could enjoy two hobbies with little travel time concerns!

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