Dancing is a language. Your partner has to know the same language as you if you are going to dance together. ~ Billy Fajardo, professional dancer, hustle and salsa instructor, judge, organizer, and world champion
If you go social dancing today, you will find that many people push, pull, and nudge their partner about in the belief that this gets their partner to do what they want. The pushing, pulling, and nudging is an ineffective method of communicating. This is not the only thing their partner is using to understand the communication.
I was watching a salsa video. I knew right away the instructor could not be leading the move the way he said. I replayed his demonstration in slow motion. Sure enough, he said one thing but did another.
How do thousands of people dance together every day? They use subconscious cues that are ingrained in their muscle memory through years of experience. Since they do not know what these subconscious cues are, there is a lot of miscommunication. This leads to experiences that can be, said nicely, improved upon.
You probably do not have a name for the method you are using to communicate. You probably cannot list the principles, rules, and signals of your communication method in a simple, logical format. In other words, while you may be doing something that seems to work, you do not know exactly what you are doing.
When you lead a move, the question you need to ask is, is my lead unambiguous? How does your partner know what you want her to do? If your communication could mean more than one thing, you are going to have a problem.
When you teach others to lead a move, not only must your lead be unambiguous, but your explanation must also be unambiguous so your students know how to execute what you are teaching. If you use a vague term like energy, without defining exactly what energy means, your students have to work out for themselves what works. This is not necessarily bad if that is what you intend, but not good if you lack the ideas to explain what you are doing.
Ambiguous communication leads to many issues, the least of which is being out of sync with your partner. More serious issues include injuries, bad habits, limited freedom of expression, and discouragement from slow progress. These issues create unpleasant experiences.
Without a clearly defined language, you have to guess what to do. You have to be something of a mind reader to understand what your partner wants. The communication is implicit, not explicit. People seek out regular partners to minimize the guesswork. Too much attachment to regular partners tends to form cliques. This makes your group less sociable. People without regular partners are left watching from the sidelines. Your group may diminish as a result. All from a failure to communicate.
A new woman came to our social. I asked her if her husband danced. She said, "I tried to teach him, but he will not dance. I am too critical." The man may love his wife, but when he goes dancing, she makes him feel horrible.
Communicating includes the whole range of communication that takes place at social dancing. The biggest problems are not the technical aspects, but rather the emotional aspects of social dancing. The problem is everyone has their own ideas of what is proper. When people's ideas differ, you may have negative consequences, like conflicts with other dancers, people feeling judged, loss of confidence, and people giving up.
In this class, our language is our syllabus of figures. You need to know these figures to dance with the people in this class. If you go somewhere else and they do not know these figures, you will not be able to dance with them. ~ Billy Fajardo, hustle and salsa instructor, judge, organizer, and world champion
One of the ways people try to solve the communication problem is with choreography. The choreography solution is inadequate for multiple reasons. One is that to dance as one with your partner, you must coordinate the exact timing and placement of each step, which you cannot do by rote memorization of patterns. Figures only give external clues to the movement. To coordinate timing and placement requires communicating through body language. The fallback, once again, is to regular partners. You do not want to limit your dancing to your regular partners. If you go social dancing, you want to be able to dance with everyone. If you go to places other than your regular dance studio, you want your skills to be transferable to those other venues.
I was dancing swing, improvising to the music, when my partner, in a sweet way, said, "Do you know the basics of swing dancing? I think some beginner lessons would help you."
I was dancing with another woman from the same ballroom studio. Instead of trying to dance to the music, I just gave her patterns she knew. After that dance, she said to me, "That was the best you ever led."
Some people consider deviation from prescribed choreography as wrong. They may only have learned figures, without having learned how to dance with a partner to the music. Dancing is so much fun, you do what you have to do to get by, but the quality of your experience suffers. There is a better way to communicate that solves these problems.
The best way to communicate is by explicitly letting your partner know what you want her to do. You signal your partner. She knows what to do by following a simple set of rules. When you learn the method in this book, you will be able to explicitly communicate with your dance partner. You will be able to list the principles, rules, and signals that you use to communicate every step. While you need to train yourself to develop the physical skills to consistently put your knowledge into practice, you will know exactly what you are doing.
"You are pushing me," Soojin scolded me.
You should not underestimate the power of having a clearly defined language. Once you learn the rules, you will have a tool that teachers, students, and your community can use to discuss precisely how to communicate. Once students understand the principles, they can figure things out for themselves. They can correct the teacher when the teacher makes mistakes.