Dance with love shining through

When you dance with a partner let love shine through, like it shines through in close friendship, in kindness to strangers, in affectionate camaraderie, in all the ways people connect with each other to overcome alienation & disconnectedness. That's what partner dancing's really good for. There are lots of ways to dance so no love shines through, lots of ways to be disconnected: you can be super technical and all caught up in your own technique, self-absorbed, competitive, simply absent, extra cool and reserved and so on. But dancing feels so much better, so much deeper & richer if you really connect with your partner as a friend; why settle for less? Partner dancing can help you connect with people, help you make new friends and get closer to people you already know; it's a way to have more love in your life. Why not go ahead and take full advantage of it? Dance with the people you connect with; if you don't connect, dance with someone else.

Partner dancing is intimate: you hold your partner in your arms. From the very first step there's a level of intimacy that many people know only with their lover. Partner dancers can know that kind of intimacy with dance friends; partner dancing can be a safe zone where you can know more intimacy and have more love in your life. While it's fun to dance sexy & close, you don't have to do that to be intimate with your partner; most of the connected partner dancing I see shines with the warm intimacy of friendship, not the hot intimacy of sexuality. Some people hold themselves back and dance with coolness and detachment, and are rarely if ever intimate with their partners. What a wasted opportunity. We can all use more love in our lives.

Connecting with your partner

Connecting with your partner has nothing to do with how good a dancer you are. You can have mad skills & moves, and fabulous "dance connection," as they say in dancer lingo, but if your focus is on you & your dancing & how it all looks, you're not really connecting. Connecting with your partner means embracing him or her as a friend. That's not a matter of technique, it's simple open-heartedness; nobody needs lessons in how to embrace a friend. You're holding a fellow human in your arms. Pay attention to your partner! Dancing for your own pleasure or to show off your skills is disconnected dancing. Connected dancing is respectful, humane, egalitarian, kind - and engaged with your partner. Dancing feels so much richer and more alive if you connect with your partner. Here are some things to consider if you want to connect:

• You have to want to dance with that person. Not just want to dance. Wanting to dance with someone is personal: you want to dance with that particular person. If you dance out of politeness or obligation or "why not?" or "anyone'll do" you won't connect, unless you can turn that around into wanting to dance with that particular person as you dance. Wanting to dance with the particular person you're holding in your arms is the very first step in connecting.
• Dance with the person, not the role. The defined roles of lead & follow are a useful tool, but they're not very important (heresy!), and there's no human warmth in a defined role. Reach through the roles to the person in your arms. Your partner's a fellow human, not a role. Stop taking the roles seriously.
• Leads have all the power, which is a problem. Partner dancing needs a lot of human warmth to overcome the power imbalance. The system is inherently unequal; if you leave it at that, you don't connect. Treat your partner as a friend; that neutralizes the inequality because friends are equals. Then the unequal system's just a game you're playing with your friend; you don't take it seriously.
• Your partner comes first. Partner is the first word in partner dance, the defining element. Dance with your partner and for your partner, not for your own enjoyment or to show off your skills. Your job as a partner is to make sure your partner has a great time. It doesn't matter if you have a great time; just make sure your partner does. And never, ever "correct" your partner; instead, do everything you can to make the dancing work.
• Be kind. All those dance etiquette do's & don't's can be replaced with those 2 words. You could replace not just dance etiquette but probably all the useful commandments & laws on the books, religious & otherwise, with "be kind."

You can connect with your partner at any point as you learn to dance; connection doesn't depend on skill. This website has practical suggestions for connecting with your partner at beginning, intermediate, and advanced stages of partner dancing.

Saying no. Looking at partner dancing this way shines a different light on those tricky questions about who to dance with and is it OK to say no. I dance because I enjoy the intimacy of connecting with my partner, and I want more intimacy in my life. If that's why you dance, then it doesn't make sense to dance with someone once you find out that the 2 of you don't connect when you dance, for whatever reason. There's no sense in blaming; with some people you connect, with others you don't. Dance with lots of different people; you never know who you're gonna connect with. The more different people you dance with, the better your chances of finding partners you do connect with. But if you've tried and found that you don't connect with a particular person, I think you should feel free to say No thank you. That's my heresy and I'm standing by it.

Connect with your partner at Waltz etcetera

These ideas have taken root and developed in me over the past 11+ years of hosting dances and teaching dance at Waltz etcetera. I see a lot of connection, a lot of respectful, humane, egalitarian, kind dancing there every Monday. From 7:30 - 9:30 we play about half waltzes and half a mix of other dances,like swing, blues, salsa, cha-cha, the occasional zydeco etcetera; after 9:30 we play a mix of slow blues, sensuous Latin, seductive waltzes & other downtempo stuff.