Dance Tips for Beginners

Dance tip of the week: where is your weight? This is such a funny concept to think about, but extremely helpful to all levels of dancers. No matter what style of dance of ballroom or Latin you’re dancing, or whether you’re a lead or a follow, this is a great question to ask yourself when you learn a new step, are practicing or just dancing for fun.

Never Settle Your Weight:

When we’re dancing, never settle your weight equally between your feet. This does wonders for remembering which foot you’re on. Once you settle your weight, you’ve now created extra work for yourself because you’ll have to shift your weight to one foot or the other to take a step. This is how stumbling happens. Commit all your weight to one foot or the other. At any point while dancing, you should be able to freeze & pick up one foot

Keep Your Weight and Shoulders Over Your Feet:

This basically means, don’t move your foot without taking your weight with you. No “sneaky feet”. When you move your foot without your weight, your partner can’t feel what you’re doing. This is how people get stepped on. This is also you can get in the bad habit of skipping steps because you “tap” your foot on the ground instead of committing your weight to it & making it a step.

Use Your Body and Weight to Communicate:

Steps are communicated by the lead to the follow through body connection and arm tension. If you’re dancing a ballroom dance, your midsections are connected and that’s how a lead moves a follow around. If you’re dancing Latin, the arm tension between partners is the communication device. Movements are not communicated with the feet. Push your weight through your partner to get them to move.

We hope you enjoyed some of these fun dance tips for beginners!

Article by Teah.