salsa-dancing-and-tension

The language of salsa dancing and the missing word...tension

As soon as you go to any salsa class or any partner dance class, one of the first things you are going to learn about is patterns. You'll hear it all the time. Dance turn patterns or patterns for short. It's how you do the dance...you string together patterns continuously when you dance.

There's a common belief among dancers, and especially the leads, that the more patterns you know, the better of a dancer you are. Unfortunately that just isn't true. The concept will never make you dance well!

The key to dancing well is learning to control your tension. This holds especially true for the male leaders. And it's the reason why you can't learn from a DVD when you first start to learn.

Most people are completely unaware of how hard they hold themselves. Even the calmest looking people hold themselves surprisingly tight. Executing patterns when you hold yourself tightly is sometimes difficult, sometimes completely impossible. I'm not kidding or exaggerating when I say this. I've seen it lots of times.

If you don't have instruction from someone who is well aware of this, where you hold yourself personally, your progress will likely be very slow and you will more than likely quit before you get a chance to enjoy yourself on a dance floor when partner dancing.

This is the reason why it's your instruction that will determine how much you enjoy yourself on the dance floor. It's also the difference between being able to dance and never being able to. There are really only two reasons why some people can't "get it" and tension is one of them.

Take just one of our Intro classes and see for yourself what a difference truly good instruction is all about.