Rolling Count, turns out to be NOT a new concept. lt is simply an identification of a skill that has long been known, but not identified. Most top professional dancers eventually dance Rolling ...
The essence of dancing is movement to music, so finding the beat in a song is extremely important. Being able to move on the beat for any kind of dance requires skill, and this is particularly true...
When you are working on any technical element of the dance, you want to be able to concentrate on the technique rather than what the music is doing. However, you also need to be able to keep a cons...
How many times have you heard, “Every pattern in West Coast Swing ends in an anchor”? Today, we’re going to flip things around and make every pattern start with an anchor instead. This exercise ass...
In a partner dance, it’s easy to be pulled off time by your partner. The pro dancers, however, have learned to use their bodies to adjust so that their feet can maintain the dance’s rhythm. In this...
We usually think that dancing slow is only necessary when we are first learning a pattern. But, dancing slow is also a great way to practice your control. In this drill, we’ll look at how you can u...
Once you’ve learned to hear the beat, it can still be challenging to dance on the beat. You need to train yourself to move your body before the beat hits, so that you are in position to land at the...
In a previous post, we introduced the concept of a tolerance window in order to describe how pros dance through the beat in a more precise manner than amateurs. This post will show how you can shri...
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...
Do you think that you can dance on the beat? There’s a secret element of timing that pros have mastered and amateur dancers haven’t. If you want to look as clean and exact as the pros with any elem...
The first part of this series introduced the difference between straight and rolling counts in west coast swing. In this post, we will introduce the third kind of count common in WCS music: the swu...
One of the biggest keys to dancing rolling triples is using the rolling count. In a rolling triple, the middle step (what we normally call the &) is closer to the upbeat than the downbeat. In order...
Almost all dances can be broken into 2-beat units of a downbeat and an upbeat. Each unit of the dance, in turn, can have a different number of weight changes and can have those weight changes occur...
In west coast swing, there are three common ways to count music: straight count, rolling count, and swung count. This post will discuss straight vs. rolling counts; a follow-up post will take up th...
