The form of partner dancing is everything you can learn in dance class, and by practicing, with or without a partner: moves, technique, dance skills. The art part, you might say. The content, the depth, the juice of partner dancing is the connection between you & your partner; the human part, the love part. For dancing to be satisfying you need both, but never under any circumstances sacrifice content for form. Life is more important than art. Friendship is more important than dancing.
Partner dance is a language, and it takes a lot of learning to get good at communicating with a partner. Beginners have no vocabulary; they can't say much; they're lacking skillful means. The more you learn, the more interesting, rich and varied your dancing can be. But like any language, dancing is useless in itself; it's only useful if it's communicating something, some content. The content of partner dancing, human connection, is the same for any dancer, from novice to master. Human connection is the juice, the real satisfaction you can get from partner dance. To get what partner dancing has to offer, you need to bring form & content into balance; an unmistakable sign of good balance is being more interested in how your partner's doing than how you're doing. Connected partner dancing glows with that kind of sweet generosity.
You may get a certain glow from being able to lead a difficult move, or respond exquisitely to a lead, but it's a very shallow glow; self-absorption has no depth, no heart. That shallow glow doesn't satisfy the longing. We all long to touch and be touched, and for that to happen you have to open your heart a little and let your partner in, treat your partner as a friend. Dancing exquisitely with strangers leaves you empty & lonely. Connect with your partner; let life in.
Friends connect; that's what friendship is. Connecting means opening up to your partner and treating him or her with friendship & warmth.
You gotta wanna - You can't connect with your partner unless you want to dance with that particular person. Wanting to dance with someone is personal and specific. When you see someone at a dance and your eyes light up - "yes you, I wanna dance with you!" - that's connection happening; that's what openness feels like.
Only equals connect - Connection can't happen if someone's dominant and someone's submissive; that's not how you treat a friend. Dominance/submission is a narrow, defined way of relating, very limited. Connection is wide open. A friend is your equal; there's no power imbalance. Treat your partner as a friend, an equal.
Focus on your partner - Forget about you and your dancing; put all your attention on your partner. "But don't I need to pay attention to how I'm dancing so I do a good job?" You have to pay attention to your own dancing when you're learning something new. As soon as you get whatever it is, stop paying attention to your own dancing. When you're learning something new you're a beginner; the beginning, learning stage of a new physical task is the awkward thinking-yourself-through-it stage: very shallow & self-absorbed, but temporarily necessary. Anyone who's been a beginning dancer knows just how unpleasant that stage can be; shallow's not much fun.
You always go through some version of the beginner stage when you learn something new: a new dance, new step, new technique. As you get comfortable with a new move (for instance), you can gradually stop thinking about it and just do it. That's when it becomes important to take your attention off you and put it on your partner; paying attention to your own dancing is no good once you can do the move. Now it's just self-absorption: "I'm so cool, look at me, I can do the move" or "I'm such a lousy dancer, everybody's laughing at me" or whatever. Putting your attention on your partner saves you from that shallow junk.
Pretty much everyone wants to look good. The question is, where's your focus? What's most important? Too much attention on what you think other people are thinking about you or how you look to other people keeps you from connecting with your partner. And you're probably wrong anyway. If you've got a good connection established with your partner, and that connection is where your center of gravity is, a little wanting to look cool is not gonna mess that up. But if your main concern is looking good or being cool on the one hand, or fear of looking stupid on the other, it'll pretty well keep you from connecting.
To become a partner dancer, you learn to lead or follow; to be any good at it, you have to know both to some degree. Lead-follow works very well; it's an effective technique for dancing with a partner. But lead-follow is not a good way to relate to a person because it's unequal: leads are in charge. That's not the right way to relate to another human; we're all equals. Lead-follow becomes a problem when that's all there is between you & your partner: unequal power sharing and no relating as humans, no connecting. Lead-follow has no human warmth; it's no way to relate to a friend. A friend is your equal. To connect with your partner you have to reach through lead-follow and dance with human warmth.
Partner dancing's more fun if no one's in charge.
Historically, men had absolute authority over women in the lead-follow relationship. These days that idea doesn't fly on the dance floor or anywhere else. Good dance teachers teach a humane, egalitarian version of lead-follow. The foundation of humane leading and following is the idea that leading is inviting and following is voluntarily responding.
Leading is inviting - Leading isn't pushing or pulling or cranking your partner, no matter how gently you do it; leading is inviting. Following isn't mechanically reacting to being pushed and pulled, it's responding to an invitation: accepting or declining. Both roles are free and 100% voluntary; both partners dance freely and voluntarily. Leading should be free of violence, coercion, domination. It takes work to learn how to invite your partner nonviolently as a lead, continuing the dance happily no matter how she responds. It takes just as much work to learn how to respond and dance freely with your partner as a follow, uncompelled to follow any lead.
Beginners can't lead or follow at first; everyone has to begin by learning moves, and learning to do moves with a partner. But beginners deserve to be pointed in the right direction; they deserve to be learning how to lead or follow from the very start. Leads should be taught from the beginning that it's never OK to shove or crank your partner around, however gently. Leading isn't shoving, and it's not a matter of learning to shove more gently; leading is making an invitation vs. giving an order. Follows should be taught that following is voluntarily responding, and not to put up with being shoved or cranked. For their safety, follows should also be taught from the beginning how to extricate themselves from heavy-handed leading, and encouraged to refuse coercive embraces that restrict their freedom of movement.
What the arms are for - Your arm connection with your partner - your frame - is not for moving your partner around, or being moved by your partner. It has 2 purposes: stabilizing the spatial relationship between your 2 bodies, and letting you offer support for your partner's voluntary movements. The lead moves from his center and that movement radiates outward via his arms. The follow simultaneously feels the movement within the frame and sees her partner move; she grasps the intention of that movement and moves in response. The frame helps coordinate & stabilize these 2 independent but connected movements, and the partners offer each other firmness to make the other's movement easier. The lead invites the follow to move in a way that suits the music and is easy and natural for her, and offers support to make that movement even easier; she can choose to accept the support or dance entirely on her own. It's the lead's business to know (without thinking about it) how much weight she has on which foot, and what kind of step will be easy and natural for her, and will fit the music.
Light touch or heavy touch? It's important for leads to lead with a light touch initially; if you start out doing heavy-handed leading, you don't get to find out what kind of touch your partner prefers. Some follows prefer a very light touch, feather light; others like more strength in the frame. When you dance with someone new, start very gently and find out what kind of touch she likes. Ask her, if necessary. Heavy-handed leading gives your partner no chance to respond voluntarily.
Heavy-handed following, hanging onto your partner and expecting him to dance you around rather than dancing on your own (in some dance circles they call this park & ride) is no fun for the lead and takes away the possibility of creativity: the lead can't play and be creative if he has to drag her around, and the follow can't play if she's being dragged; park & ride's a drag for everyone. Creative following means you dance with your partner but on your own, maintaining your own weight & balance.
Most of the time a very light touch is all you need. At certain moments, like direction changes & dips, stronger framing is needed. But especially at those moments, make sure everything's voluntary. If I'm inviting my partner to make a sudden change of direction, I offer a firm frame that she can rest in or push off from to make the direction change easy. But she still has the choice: she can let go and not use my firm frame and just keep going the direction she was going before. This is especially important for dips and other moves where the follow is giving her weight & balance to the lead: the lead is an invitation and the follow is free to say no.
Mutually voluntary movement - The right kind of frame plus a light touch combine to create a relationship where all movement is voluntary. Almost all leading & following is mediated through the arms, because that way either partner (particularly the follow) can easily opt out of a move by relaxing her arms, so that her torso simply stays where it is and her arms move around it. That's what you do instead of letting yourself get pushed off center. The lead's right hand is on his partner's back, but if he's a skilled lead, there's never any pushing or pulling done by that arm, just offering support as needed. Some dances have leading & following that isn't mediated through the arms: hip checks and moves where the lead initiates or invites a move by placing his hand somewhere in his partner's torso. These are very tricky to lead without brutality, so make sure you know what you're doing with that kind of lead.
Don't move your partner, move yourself - Don't use your strength to move your partner, use your partner's strength to move yourself. This is one of the great secrets of a good lead-follow connection: never use it to move your partner, only use it to move yourself. Have the strength of frame ready to make it easy for your partner to move, and as you feel that movement begin and the frame strengthening, respond to that and give your partner the best possible springboard for whatever he or she is doing.
When you blend lead & follow, the inequality vanishes and the real depths of partner dancing open up for you. Women get to create & collaborate, not just interpret a script written by the man. Men get to be receptive, to welcome women's creativity and respond to it creatively. Blending lead & follow transforms your relationship with your partner: no assigned roles means you both have to pay exquisitely close attention to each other all the time; you both have to stay awake. Blending lead and follow is also deeply respectful: I respond to my partner as an equal, a fellow human, and that's how she responds to me. Leads no longer assert authority; follows no longer submit. We no longer limit our responses to the defined roles of lead & follow. Two humans connecting and playing with each other, rather than two roles playing defined parts in a defined hierarchy.
How much you can blend depends in part on how much dance you know. Well developed dance skills and a big dance vocabulary help you respond to your partner. Blending works better if you have some common ground with your partner; the more dance you know, the more partners you'll have common ground with.
Blending lead & follow means including some of the other role: leads become more receptive, follows more actively creative. This deepens the connection between you dramatically, opening up new doors for both of you to connect to the other through. It's not easy for most dancers; there's a hump to be gotten over, because blending the roles is unconventional. It goes against the grain of dance training because it seems like mistakes beginning dancers make: follows who backlead, leads who are wimpy or unclear with their leading.
Leads make their way over the hump by learning to be more attentive to their partner, feeling and seeing more of what their partner has to offer in the dance, and by shaking off the idea that leading is a privilege and obligation that comes with being born with a y-chromosome. As you tune into your partner and pay more attention to her, your dancing gets deeper without you even knowing it. You naturally begin to adjust your leading to each partner you dance with, letting her creative energy shape the moves you lead. As you go deeper and pay even more attention, you find yourself responding not just to your partner's energy but to the palpable creative elements she offers, letting her creative contributions shape the dance. You begin naturally following your partner's lead as she's following yours. You discover you're more interested in what she's doing than in what you're doing.
For follows, it's a matter of relaxing and letting the creative juices begin to flow. Follows get creative initiative trained out of them, sometimes quite harshly, so getting the juices flowing again can be a healing process. Follows who've experienced this kind of harsh repression need to practice blending lead & follow with a partner they know will be receptive and kind. This transition is a very delicate one for follows who have years of training that it's wrong to take creative initiative. If a follow's creative initiatives are met with receptivity & encouragement, it'll be easier for her to move into more and more active creativity.
The goal is to make the level of focus & interest equal: what the follow has to contribute is just as focal and interesting as what the lead has to contribute. I can say that as a lead, that's not how it feels; it feels more like giving away all of the focus and interest to my partner and her dancing; partners have told me that how it feels to them is that they're hogging all the attention & the limelight. That's how it should feel, because you're in the course of righting an imbalance. Leads need to feel surrender, the giving away quality; follows need to feel assertion, the quality of command and active self-expression. You're not really giving it all away, leads, or taking it all for yourselves, follows, but that's what it feels like and it's right for it to feel like that. It can be a deeply healing experience for both.
Creating a safe space for your partner - Moving into blended lead & follow is a process of opening up and becoming deeply vulnerable to your partner; with openness comes vulnerability. So a crucial aspect of your deepening relationship with your partner is providing a safe space for your partner to be creative and vulnerable in. Your partner needs to be able to rely on your skill and sensitivity, and feel very confident that you won't do anything stupid. You can only get there by dancing together. As you move into blended lead & follow, it's important to prove to each other, again and again, that you're a reliable partner.
What does blended lead & follow feel like? Most of the time (see exception below) it feels very light. You lead & follow by the merest fingertip contact, with featherlight touch, in open hand-in-hand positions, regular ballroom embrace, and close embrace. You move freely among all kinds of embraces with no heaviness, no weight. Sure, the strength is there when needed, for your partner to rest in or spring off from when strength is needed and you momentarily give each other your weight or transfer momentum. But it's only there for exactly as long as needed; you immediately return to a very light touch.
The reason for a light touch is sensitivity: the lighter your touch, the more sensitive you can be to your partner. A heavy touch bulldozes right over anything your partner may have to offer before you even know it's there. It's the lead's responsibility to develop and maintain a light touch. If the lead has a heavy touch, the follow has no choice but to respond with comparable weight or be blown away. As you're learning to blend lead & follow, the follow's role is to respond to a light touch and not need anything heavier while the lead works to develop a light touch. Once you're there everything evens out, but the process of refining the touch has to begin with the lead.
It also feels ambiguous & uncertain; ambiguity and uncertainty are ongoing, they don't go away. You never know what's going to happen next, and sometimes the dance disappears momentarily, then comes back into focus and you move on. If you're attached to your dancing being smooth and self-assured, this isn't for you. Being concerned about what your dancing looks like gets in the way. Putting that kind of attention & concern on yourself keeps you from being sensitive & open to your partner. There's a sort of naked feeling when you blend lead & follow: you're exposed, you don't know what's about to happen, and there's nowhere to hide. Thus the need for you & your partner to create a safe space for each other.
You & your partner hold each other, and the music holds both of you together. Music has 3 dimensions that help hold the 2 of you together: basic beat, rhythmic phrasing, and mood or feeling. These are all elements in your dance, and they're elements that you & your partner have in common. You may have very different dance backgrounds, styles, approaches etcetera; what you for sure have in common is the song that's playing right now, that has a certain beat, structure & mood. You both surrender to the song and explore it together; people who can't or won't surrender to the music are not much fun to dance with.
The value of music comes from it not being in your head; it's something outside you and your partner, something you can agree on, though sometimes it takes a little work & patience to find that agreement. The music helps you stay together as a couple dancing because it holds you both at once. You can also each use it individually as a tool for breaking up self-absorption: pay attention to the music; pay attention to my partner; forget about me.
Your partner grasps the music a little differently than you do. That's always the case; 2 people never hear the music exactly the same. Respecting those differences and honoring your partner's grasp of the music is yet another way of connecting with your partner. This is the extreme opposite of trying to "correct" your partner because you don't think he or she is dancing to the beat. Let go of your own understanding of the music and embrace your partner's, even if it doesn't make sense to you at first. This is an extremely effective way of connecting. Men, take heed. Women are already used to doing this, bless 'em. Oh, and men, please take note: women are better at grasping the music than we men are. Word.
Learning from your partner is a great way to connect. What you and your partner can learn from each other is how to dance together, the 2 of you in particular. Learning to dance together in particular is an integral part of blended lead & follow, but it's something you can start doing relatively early in the course of learning to dance, long before you can really blend. Learning from your partner is based on mutual respect: first you have to acknowledge that you can learn from each other.
You begin by remembering, and respecting, your partner's preferences: this partner doesn't like to break out of a cha-cha into a polka, this partner likes to dance close but not too close, this partner is uncomfortable with that little dip routine you're so fond of. You remember, and you adapt your dancing to what your partner likes. If you dance with someone consistently, you begin to discover things that work particularly well for the 2 of you. You can learn from each other by exploring those things, seeing where they take you. What is it about that move that works so well? How else could you embody that quality in that dance or some other dance? Joint exploration of what works is the beginning of blended lead & follow.
Nobody starts out connected; you have to dance with someone to find out if that's someone you connect with. If you're interested in making new friends, treat a new partner as a friend, even though they're not yet. Some partners won't be interested in being your friend, even a dance friend, which can be baffling and bruising. You're dancing with someone, trying to connect, but they're just not there. It's not that they're struggling but unable to connect, they're just not interested. They're not interested in you, so they're not trying to connect. You're being given a mercy dance, or a politeness dance, or maybe it's the dance of indifference: "Sure, why not, might as well, nothing better to do." But other partners you'll connect with, and you'll make new dance friends. Treat each new partner as a friend because sometimes it works.
Some dances just don't feel very welcoming. There's an in-group, or a particular style of dance you're "supposed" to do, or some kind of organization; something that you have to subscribe to or already be a part of to be welcomed, be in the in-crowd. It can be discouraging if you let it get to you. But if you simply focus on connecting with your partner, the person in your arms right now, that all becomes irrelevant. You can have a great time dancing without having to be one of the cool kids.