Swing Dancing: Tips for a Beginner Lead

Being a lead is tough stuff. Dancing is like a team sport, except with a different teammate every dance. Learning to build chemistry can be as difficult as rocket science, especially for rocket scientists.

In any social dance, a lead has to:

• Ask someone to dance
• Navigate the dance floor to find open space
• Find the beat of the music
• Figure out what kind of song it is (swing, blues, soul, techno)
• Continually think up of sequence of moves that fit the music
• Figure out when the breaks are coming and what to do
• Make sure partner isn’t running into something
• Make sure partner isn’t running into you
• Give room for partner to play with
• Execute moves with grace, style, and precision
• Look like you know what you’re doing
• Look like you’re having fun (or fake it)

Whereas follows have to:

• Wait for a dance
• Follow

Ok, that might be just a little biased.

Other subtle stuff:

• Getting a good connection with partner, even if you’ve never danced before
• Figuring out what level to dance at to match partner
• Compensating for your mistakes and their mistakes
• Adjusting to the partner’s style

The mechanics are even more complicated. Tension, momentum, force, compression, dynamic equilibrium, torque, these are all things that good dancers know and use intuitively.

Social dancing is very complicated and really hard. Don’t feel bad for being “bad” for weeks and months. It’s so hard that the day I believe in artificial intelligence is the day I see a robot spontaneously dancing with a human partner. I would settle with just seeing a computer spit out a coherent sequence of moves, given a music file as input.

As if the complexity of dancing wasn’t enough, leads usually bear most of the responsibility for a bad dance. This can create frustration and fear of failure, especially in the initial stages, preventing leads from advancing their dancing. This is in contrast to solo sports or musical instruments, where you can practice in your room by yourself before revealing your honed skills to the world. With dancing, you have to practice with others in order to improve.

The best way to improve is to dance with follows who are at least intermediate and who you trust… that way they can give you honest feedback on whether your move signals work, or whether they are faking it (either by looking at you or by guessing). No matter how simple the move, you always want to genuinely lead it… try blindfolding the follow and see if they can still follow it.

It’s especially important not to develop bad habits early on. They’re tough to break. This applies to follows especially… please don’t always follow something unless it’s clear! Positive reinforcement for improperly led moves is really bad for leads.

Regarding moves, I am strongly against the flashy stuff they show in movies like Swing Kids… unless you have great technique, flashy moves like the Pretzel are hard for beginners to pull off and risk injury to the follow. PLEASE do not injure others with moves you can’t execute properly. Besides, the Pretzel simply looks silly on the dance floor.

In my first swing lesson ever, I was taught… the swingout. On day one. We then went out to a social dance afterwards and I literally did only swingouts for 2 hours. I had beginner’s courage and my partners were nice. Your partners will most likely be nice to you too, so don’t worry if you only know 3 moves. Follows will tell you that they would rather dance to only 3 moves with an enthusiastic lead, than an experienced one who shows no interest.

Leads: Keep practicing and keep dancing! Use good technique and stay positive.

Follows: keep encouraging beginner leads! Even the smallest compliment or encouragement makes a huge difference.