When you’ve mastered hearing upbeats and downbeats in music, you are ready to bring that skill into your pattern work. West coast swing is a two-beat dance, so all patterns are built on the downbeat-upbeat structure. If all you dance is basic, off-the-shelf WCS patterns, you don’t need to know that structure because the dance … Read more
With all the styling variations, play, and syncopations in WCS, you need to be able to react when your partner does something unexpected. How do you practice reacting to a surprise? You remove the surprise. By practicing the right response when you know exactly what’s coming, you develop the capacity to respond when you don’t … Read more
We know that we want play to compliment WCS rather than replace it, and we also know that we use play in order to help interpret the music. These two goals actually provide a lot of guidance for when play is and is not appropriate, as well as how long play should last. Some play … Read more
So far, you’ve discovered your play vocabulary and cleaned up your movements so they look good. Now that you can execute your movements consistently, it’s time to fit them to music. The Drill: For each movement that you’ve developed, do the movement without music. Ask yourself what the movement does. Does it feel like the … Read more
If you’ve hosted your closed-windows dance party, you should have some movements that have the potential to be good play pieces. How do you polish them so that you’re willing to dance them in front of people? The Drill: This is a solo drill. Start by picking one or two of the “this has potential” … Read more
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