Dance is walking.
Nobody can teach you this, because you already know how to walk.
My friend Vuk Vuković, whom I met through dance and who has taught me to be bold about the philosophy of dance, once gave a one-minute speech on a square in my home town summarising the essence of son dance. I happened to film it. As he reflected later, it was actually a perfect summary of all partner dances worth their salt. I have since spread his sermon to many people, and it ties into some other thoughts experiences I’ve had recently.
- Dance is walking.
- You already know how to walk.
- Here are the cases I’m not making.
- Empowerment, not relativism
- Conclusion
Dance is walking.
Here is the beautiful quote which I have preached as gospel since Vuk uttered it:
That’s the dance. Dance is walking; in the frame, and on the rhythm. Nobody can teach you this, because you already know this: you know how to walk.
Frame here is to be seen in the broad sense: it encompasses not just closed frame (casino’s posición cerrada), but also the tension you keep with only one point of connection (casino’s posición abierta and caída) and the attention you keep when there are no points of connection. Frame also interacts with rhythm, since it is the leader’s frame that signals to the follower what the count is, i.e. when the follower should shift her weight to which foot in order to be synchronised with him.
The above is an essential mechanical mindset when learning to dance. My personal view of how casino should be taught and thought of – using positional theory – is a higher-level implementation of this general mindset: once you know how to walk, you can learn where to walk.
Yet, you will struggle to find a single casino teacher who teaches either of the above mindsets. This is where most beginners’ problems originate.
You already know how to walk.
How is this even acceptable?
Inevitably – it doesn’t have to be, but it is – you will see people on the dance floor, in class or at socials, who move their legs as if they are recent stroke victims or a baby giraffe, despite having taken weeks or months or even years of classes.
They stumble clumsily and rigidly through a song, barely managing to not fall over due to large steps far from their centre of mass forwards or backwards, perhaps even pulling on their dance partner to avoid this,1 sometimes hopping from leg to leg or unconvincedly feeling out the ground in front of them, and in some cases even seemingly surprised that every 8 counts follow each other with equal spacing between (followed by another 8 counts that are spaced the exact same way, and so on).
And yet, minutes earlier, these same people walked into the room with upright posture, small steps without hesitation, and a periodic gait. There was no struggle. They walk forwards, because walking backwards would be inefficient. They walk upright, because if they would lean back over one of their feet, they would fall over due to lack of another force rotating them forwards. They walk with small steps, because a big step forwards takes away momentum and is hence inefficient, and legs spread apart too far trap the weight on both feet, which requires too much time to recover from. They don’t hop because it is entirely useless. They are not afraid of the ground they walk on. They walk perfectly periodically, and they don’t even need music to keep them timed.
Teacher-induced psychosis
We all know how to walk. It is severe malpractice by teachers to not disabuse students of the notion – or worse, explicitly teach, e.g. through unnatural step patterns – that dancing and walking are two entirely different ways of using their legs. For some reason, students go to dance schools and come away with the idea that they should move in a particularly distinct way on the dance floor than they otherwise would. And thus, on the dance floor, this is exactly what you see: you see students who force their bodies to desperately move in all ways which are not walking.
It looks unnatural because their mindset is precisely that they want to do something unnatural. In their mind, if they would just walk, they would not be doing the thing they learnt in class, because they go to class to learn something they don’t know yet, and they know that they know how to walk, so walking cannot be the correct thing to do.
The hallmark of a bad dance teacher is that after their students have attended their classes, the students dissociate on the dance floor and forget the walking that they have trained their entirely lives. In this psychosis, you will observe all of the above-mentioned ailments that plague beginners: they have no balance, they pull on their partners, they take large steps backwards, they hop, they hesitate, they lack periodicity, and so on.
Culture-induced psychosis
We can also blame modern culture for this tendency to see dance as “its own thing”.
If I told you my hobbies were sleeping and eating and browsing the internet and shopping for groceries, you would laugh at me, because it is ridiculous to see these actions as distinct from average life. Similarly, in ancient Greece, “jogging” did not exist as its own thing, because running for stamina training was an obvious part of average life. It is quite unnatural for a mammalian species to have “moving for better stamina” be something so few individuals do that when it does happen, it deserves a special name.
Dancing as a hobby is quite unnatural. There could exist a world where it would be ridiculous to say that dancing is a hobby, because “of course you dance, that’s just something we humans do”. In such a world, because dancing is not its own thing for which you have to go out of your way before it becomes part of your life, people would not forcibly make their steps stand out from steps in average life, since dancing would not be thought of as “this special thing I do which is so different from average life”.
Here are the cases I’m not making.
Revisiting the backstepping debate
It may sound like all of this is just another entry in casino’s infamous backstepping debate, which is a long-standing feud of one group of people claiming that followers stepping backwards at any point in any Cuban dance is not-done, and another group of people claiming that it is not an issue.
This is the wrong framing of what I have written above. The case I make above is not one from tradition, but from pragmatics. The two are deeply intertwined – for example, the reason why Miami-style backstepping guapea is incorrect is foremost because guapea originated in rueda as a historical matter, and since a rueda is danced on a circle, the dancers’ foot patterns are adapted to most easily staying on that circle – but I am not here to finger-wag or pearl-clutch about violating sacred conventions.
I am simply here to make a point about mindset. About perspective. About conceptual separation. You should not separate dancing and walking as different concepts in your head. This is a psychotic overcomplication. It can only harm you.
The practical difference between these two interpretations of what I have written are the following. When you believe that my appeal is part of the backstepping debate, then you can reduce what I have said to “never backstep whatever happens”. The problem with this is that it still demands of dancers that they separate in their head what is natural from what is dance, and thus they will try to force their bodies into movements that do not serve them well in certain situations. Also, they will be focused on not doing something rather than doing something.
Meanwhile, when you remove the distinction between dance and walking from your mind, backsteps may or may not occur, depending on what is necessary at the time, just like in real life. What matters is not the focus on not doing backsteps, but on control. All of the beginner ailments come down to a lack of bodily control, whereas the same people are perfectly controlled in their everyday walking. So, when you control yourself as you do naturally, backsteps may be the obvious thing to do in some situations: dancing is walking, but walking is not dancing, since you don’t turn when you walk and you are not connected to something that tenses your arm forwards.
Example: when leading an enchufla, a good frame requires pulling (but not dragging, of course) the follower towards your right. In doing so, you will experience Newton’s third law: you pulling her to your right, somewhere around 4 and 5, makes her pull you to your left. But you don’t want to go to your left on 4 or 5, so by Newton’s second law, you need a compensating force that pushes you to your right. So, where is this force coming from?
- In rueda, you want to walk past her as soon as possible.2 Thus, you want your right foot on 5 to be a step forwards. This means that between 4 and 5, you pivot on your left foot and push yourself off the ground with that foot to generate a compensating force that is so strong that it propels you rightwards.
- In pareja (or enchufla y quedate), you want to lead her into caída whilst staying in-place. You could keep yourself stationary by pushing (but less) with the same left foot on 4, but this is arguably an awkward movement since the next foot does not step out in the direction of the push. This is exactly why in at least one school of casino styling (namely MCC) the leader hooks his right foot behind his left foot on the 5 of an enchufla, to give the necessary push rightward. As you’ll notice in this video and this video, that backstep happens at the exact same time as the pull into caída.
Relativism
Do not confuse pragmatics with relativism. Despite my very first article on dancing casino containing several beginner errors taught to me by bad teaching, one thing I got right was the introduction: relativists are wrong. It is not the case that “anything is correct as long as you have fun” – reminiscent of “all interpersonal activity is edifying as long as there is mutual consent” – and indeed nobody who dances aesthetically actually carries this mentality.
Every dance figure has a tolerance region of limb trajectories and force vectors. This is what teachers are supposed to model. As long as your limb trajectories fall inside this tolerance region, it is correct. There is such a thing as an incorrectly executed enchufla. It isn’t just a matter of “enjoying” and “feeling” and all of this nonsensical loser babble. I see bad enchuflas at every social I go to. How do I know they are bad? I don’t even have to get into the subleties of rueda-conformant casino, i.e. that every couple figure should be performed relative to the stationary centre of an imaginary rueda. They are bad because all eight limbs involved are visibly being strained excessively.
Empowerment, not relativism
I have preached this message more to people who had not had a single dance class than to any other group of people. Why these people? Because it is these people who most often tell me “I’m sorry, I’ll be too bad at this, I can’t partner dance” when I approach them at a social where anyone from the public can wander in.3 I always retort by asking if they can walk, and this empowers them to try. By the end of the dance, they are happily surprised about how much innate skill they didn’t think they had. Why? Because again, they live in a culture where dancing is its own thing.
Lack of empowerment (or more simply, confidence) is actually a much broader problem in partner dancing, and the same message could perhaps help alleviate some of it. This probably requires a separate article, but followers rarely experience good frame (again, frame in the broad sense). I know this for three reasons: I can see loose leading when I watch others dance, I can feel it when a follower doesn’t herself have frame and has no clue how to listen to mine (despite having danced longer than I have and perhaps also with more partners), and finally, skilled followers in my community have enthusiastically agreed with my observation whenever I pointed it out. Why is this the case? To me, it seems clear: because we lack confident, responsible, assertive, decisive, masculine men. Without these traits, it is impossible to lead. There is no “nice guy” way to lead. You have to dare hold a woman firmly and you have to dare guide her movement. You have to bear the responsibility of carrying the conversation, rather than having awkward pauses (the dreaded infinite guapea). You have to decide that you will do this now and not that.
Note nevertheless that there are very clear gradations in skill across dancers. I repeat that dance is walking is a mindset for controlling the body. It is not a relativistic statement like “everyone is an equally good dancer, just be confident, there is no such thing as skilled or unskilled dance”. My message serves as a warning against teachers who teach negative skill. We don’t stop to think that negative skill exists, but it does. That’s what a handicap is: beginning to make progress not at the starting line, but behind the starting line. Teachers who teach students the wrong foundation make their students start their marathon by running backwards for an indefinite amount of time, attempting to build a house on a foundation of shit.
Conclusion
Dance is walking. It does not require learning separate biomechanics. The lack of this mindset causes beginners to make all kinds of errors, and teachers are responsible for this. No, this is not a plea against backstepping. No, this is not a plea in favour relativist denial of skill. It is a foundational mindset for how to move the body in a partner dance. The longer you go without this mindset, the longer it will take to clear yourself of this debt.
You cannot fall over as long as your centre of mass is somewhere above the strip that fills in the area between the two surface areas outlined by your feet, or when standing on one foot, when your centre of mass is above that foot’s area. The physical reason why a beginner who takes large backsteps needs to pull on the partner is because they lean back so far behind their heel that their centre of mass falls behind the area of their foot. Thus the force of gravity applies over a moment arm and they start rotating backwards (falling over) unless a second force is applied over another moment arm that rotates them forwards. ↩︎
This assumes the enchufla-y-dame convention rather than enchufla-y-quedate. ↩︎
As all social dancers will tell you, it’s very easy to tell who is and who isn’t a dancer the moment they walk in. ↩︎
