When people see that a ballroom dance class is suddenly available in their local area, some are eager to sign up right away, while others are so nervous and hesitant that they won’t budge even if they want to try it out. In this handy guide, learn what to expect when you join your first ballroom dance class, or when you start working with any new ballroom instructor anywhere!
The first things you’ll encounter is a shortlist indeed:
Remove street shoes and switch into suede-soled ballroom dance shoes or just get ready to dance in your socks. This is for your safety since you’ll need to glide, turn, and move with good connection to the floor, and grippy non-slip shoes can cause serious injuries.
Your instructor will introduce themselves to you and chat a bit about what you should expect over the coming weeks in your dance classes together. They WON’T share their entire exhaustive curriculum vitae of their life of professional dancing because this scares beginners away and creates an intimidation factor that’s not conducive to your positive learning experience. *If you want to learn more about your instructor’s history in dance, approach and inquire directly with them after a class and they’ll be happy to share more details.
Once the initial introductions are covered; usually including safety precautions; your instructor will invite you to join them on the dance floor!
Beginner dancers benefit from getting up and dancing right away! Your instructor knows this, and it helps them with a necessary step – gauging the skill level of the people in the class. So the first thing you’ll be led to do in most every beginner level ballroom dance class will be some very simple steps everyone can begin to walk in place, and you’ll notice your instructor turning to take a look at everyone in the room individually to see how you handle this.
Your instructor is mentally calculating exactly what they can teach to you and your class and what they can not due to the average skill level and the physical abilities of everyone in the room.
Dance instructors want to help you have a good time while you gain essential skills taking your first steps into the world of dance, so they skillfully gauge how everyone moves and responds in the first steps and they will instantly customize the curriculum to suit this particular group and your skill level. Maybe a fancier move for this class, or a simpler one for that class, and this happens on the fly to meet the brand new ballroom dancer where you are.
You can expect to be challenged in a ballroom dance class; that it will require moving and thinking in totally new and different ways than anything else you’ve done before. Ballroom dancing is known to have major health benefits especially in terms of preventing age-related degeneration such as Alzheimer’s and dementia, and the overall mental and physical decline that comes with aging. For you, regardless of your current age, you may find yourself stumped at times or feel the supreme delight of a lightbulb moment of understanding and doing that is sheer joy to experience.
What a class might cover
Any beginner level ballroom dance class follows a process that helps new dancers learn easily and get dancing quickly for maximum fun potential! The class outline looks something like this:
The instructor will start the class with a Basic step. Your dance teacher will show it and talk you through it, and they’ll describe the name of the dance, the genre, the era where it originated, the style of music it fits with, and possibly where in your life you might see this dance performed – this information helps you know what you’re doing and understand what the dance should be while your teacher is looking around and calculating what the class can do over the next hour.
Next, your teacher will guide you in how to put the Basic together with a partner so you can dance together – Ballroom and social dances are partnered. This will come with plenty of show and tell about the partner connection and how it works, and how to do it right.
The first “Move” you’ll be taught in any ballroom dance is most often the Single Turn – because just dancing the Basic gets pretty boring pretty fast and your instructor knows that new dancers want to pull cool fun moves right away, so this is the first one to learn and try. It’s not hard, and this is usually the point in your first class where you and your partner will be grinning and enjoying it and feeling delighted that you can pull a turn like this and dance well so very quickly!
Once you have the Basic, you can put it with a partner, and you can pull the Single Turn, then your instructor will walk you through a few more Moves in that style of dance and talk you through putting the moves together in an open dance floor situation making it fit to the music.
At the beginner level, ballroom dance instructors actively teach with words while they demonstrate and lead you through these early steps and moves because of the way new social dancers learn. It goes something like this:
Understanding comes before performance. Your instructor knows this and will work to give you a good understanding of what you should be doing to perform a dance, but as you walk through the steps and moves in class for your first time, you’ll feel awkward and uncoordinated simply because your body hasn’t moved like that before.
Just like it takes practice for a kid to master the coordination of riding a bike, your dance instructor might advise you to go home and just walk your Basic step on your own to a song or two in order to repeat and repeat the step to give your whole body greater experience in moving in this new way until it begins to feel more natural to you.
At the beginning level, dance instructors have to talk a lot because beginner students aren’t yet ready to dive into more advanced movements, patterns and variations without having that base of solid knowledge underneath.
When you can walk through steps and moves correctly in a smooth and practiced way at Level 1, your instructor will praise you and invite you to join a higher level class to enable you in taking your dancing to the next level! Show your dance instructor that you’re getting it and that you can do it, and that’s the proof that’s necessary for advancement!
Social etiquette gets taught to beginner ballroom dancers!
Details about how to ask someone to dance, how to answer when someone asks you, how to lead your partner to the floor and back again, and the unique social norms that exist only in social dance communities that don’t happen anywhere else in American society – your dance instructor will sprinkle these details into the lessons for your class knowing that nobody in a Level 1 dance class has gone to a real social ballroom dance before and that there’s nowhere else in our society where this gets taught.
Amateur instructors might skip this and just focus on the dance steps – but that’s when small town social dance communities have problems with guys treating the ladies disrespectfully, acting like a social dance is a meat market where they can shop for a hook up.
Pro instructors infuse proper social dance etiquette as a part of their instruction to ensure their students launch into the dance world knowing the proper way to interact at a dance from the start, and this makes easing into this new social activity you’re getting in to far easier and nicer for you.
And just like with everything else in a dance class, when your instructor sees you taking this in stride and applying the teachings in the classroom practice environment, they’ll know you’re ready to move on and up to the next step, the next move, the next level of expertise.
It’ll be easy!
A good dance instructor will most likely have you dancing and smiling about it by the end of the first lesson, and they will guide you to know and understand the process of how your dance classes will work, how things will go, and will praise you at every possible opportunity to clearly show when you’re getting it right!
It can take several classes for beginner dancers to work through their feelings of anxiety and the strangeness of moving your body in a totally new and different way than you ever have before. Give yourself a break if you can, try to relax, and you’ll find that becoming a dancer can be a smooth, easy metamorphosis if you let it!
