Smile At Your Partner

Dancing is supposed to be fun! When you smile at your partner, not only does it look like you are having a good time, but it also makes your partner feel better. However, many people struggle with ...

Being A Good Partner

As part of the #DontBeADanny campaign, this week’s post is going to talk about how you can be a good partner during your dance. Leaders, this post is especially valuable for you because we leads te...

Mirroring Your Partner

The third option for styling as a partnership is to mirror your partner. While this is the method of “team styling” that most people think of first, it’s actually a risky choice because there’s a l...

Contrasting Your Partner’s Styling

In this series, we are exploring how to work with your partner’s styling. Most of the time we think that working with your partner means you need to be doing similar things, but in this post we’ll ...

Proactive Following

Last week, Swungover posted a phenomenal article on why “just following” is bad advice for dancers. In this post, we’re going to highlight some key ideas in the article and talk about how you can a...

Complimenting Your Partner’s Styling

You’ve practiced paying attention to what your partner is doing. Now it’s time to do something with that awareness. In this drill, we’re going to focus on how to compliment your partner’s styling. ...

Working Off Your Partner’s Styling

Pro dancers have a phenomenal ability to work off of what their partner is doing. Many of the magic moments we see in on-the-fly choreography come from a particularly inspired way for the partners ...

Practicing Floorcraft

Floorcraft is a skill that doesn’t get talked about a lot, but it makes a huge difference in the quality of the dance. Dancers who are masters of floorcraft are sought after within their communitie...

Selling the Music

In the WCS musicality partnership, one person (generally the leader) is responsible for setting up accents, and the other partner (generally the follower) is responsible for doing something with th...

Improv With Your Partner

You’ve seen the pros suddenly break out into a freestyle dance and immediately start mimicking each other. Whether you want to “break it down” for a few beats or want to respond to your partner’s d...

Dance with No Music

Dancing can be defined as movement to music. West coast swing is famous as a dance in part because of the variety of music that works for the dance. It’s so obvious that dance and music belong toge...

Focus on Teamwork

Although WCS is a partner dance, we generally teach the dance in terms of what is expected from your role. As a result, it can be years before you start to learn how to dance with your partner. Thi...

Know Your Partner’s Musicality

One of the reasons that musical interpretation adds so much to the dance is that we all hear different things in the music. If you dance with a regular partner—either socially or in a strictly swin...