Anders Papitto

I’ve been dancing for just about three years as I write this (September 2021 - September 2024). That has mostly been in and around San Francisco, and mostly partner dances. I started with and am most comfortable with Lindy Hop, but I’ve been branching out since the last 12 - 18 months.

These are some of my assorted impressions and thoughts. It’s definitely not anything comprehensive, and almost certainly wrong in ways I don’t realize yet.

I have some thoughts on the dances themselves, especially in comparison to each other, and then some thoughts on the surrounding environment that are mostly less dance-specific.

Mistakes

I’m going to state a lot of things as facts instead of cramming every single sentence with qualifiers, but this is definitely not 100% accurate, and probably nowhere close. If I’m wrong/confused/misrepresenting something that you know better than me (not hard!), get in touch and let me know.

Some video examples (from people who are actually good)

The dances themselves (and especially how they differ)

Some things to consider about various dance styles are

Music

What sort of music are they danced to? What tempo range? Are there other particular characteristics of the music that are reflected in the movement?

Connection

What kinds of connections are used? how much frame is required?

Shape

How do partners move relative to each other on a large scale? I.e. how would the dances look if each dancer were represented just by their center of mass? How much do they travel? Is there linear momentum? Is there angular momentum? Within each dancer and/or across the partnership?

Body parts

What parts of the body are being danced with? Are some parts more functional and other parts more expressive?

Basic step

Is there a basic step? How good is it?

Pulse

Do the dancers pulse/bounce, or do they glide? What sort of pulse?

Lead/Follow emphasis

How much of what happens in the dance is lead and followed?

Skill requirement

How much skill is required for people to enjoy the dance?

Are there other dance styles closely associated with this one? Is this dance style itself already a result of combining other dances? (hint: yes)

Showiness

Does the dance emphasize dramatic, flashy movements? Are the creative choices more subtle? To what extent is it meant to be watched vs meant to be danced?

So, let’s look at some of those

Music

Tempo

from high to low, in general and with lots of overlap:

  • balboa
  • shag
  • charleston, solo jazz
  • lindy, house
  • west coast swing, fusion
  • blues

Time period

  • balboa, shag, charleston, lindy, blues are usually danced to music > 50 years old
  • house, west coast, fusion are usually danced to music < 50 years old

Miscellaneous

  • lindy triple steps depend pretty heavily on the swung rhythm (in “1 and 2”, “and” is closer to “2” than it is to “1”, and that’s reflected in the timing of the footwork). None of the other dances have this dependency.
  • jazz music is often live, and itself contains improvisation, which means that your dancing can’t rely on knowing exactly what’s coming.
  • jazz music has common drum/bass breaks/solos, which can be pretty terrifying to beginners because they provide much less accessible structure to the dancers.
  • west coast swing and fusion are regularly danced to music that doesn’t have much rythmic emphasis, e.g. I’ve heard the term “lyrical” songs used.
  • west coast swing is often danced in half time for some slower sections of the song. In lindy this would be a bit odd, because triple steps would no longer be swung (full beats are evenly spaced)

Connection

Distance

One basic way to look at this is how close the connection is. From furthest to closest:

  • beginner wcs
  • lindy, charleston, shag
  • advanced wcs,
  • balboa, blues, fusion

Basic beginner patterns in wcs spend a lot of time at two arms length, and even with the torsos angled away from each other - it’s basically impossible to get further than that. More advanced wcs supplements that with a variety of holds on the torso, upper arms, neck, and with more time spent in the middle rather than the ends of the slot. In comparison, lindy introduces side-by-side position immediately but doesn’t add as many new upper body connections with higher skill.

Balboa has a very close but “functional” chest-to-chest connection, which is being used to communicate rapid footwork/rhythm/momemtum. In contrast, close connections in blues, and especially in fusion, can be less about mechanical functionality and more like emotional hugs.

Frame

In terms of frame and rigidity of the upper body, it might be something like

  • wcs, shag
  • lindy, balboa
  • blues

Shag is fast and can have many sudden shifts, so a lot of frame is required to keep the partnership responsive.

Wcs needs frame for a different reason. It’s much slower, but there’s often a need to lead and follow turns and foot-specific weight transfers from relatively static positions, using just a single hand-to-hand connection - that only works if that single hand is pretty tightly connected to the torso. It also can require that the hands be wider apart than in the other dances.

In contrast, lindy and balboa use more momentum for some things (like turns) that are more frame-based in wcs.

Miscellaneous

  • wcs uses far more variety of connections (in terms of which parts of the bodies are in contact) than the other dances, and in a more improvised way. The relatively slow and static baseline makes it more reasonable to take a handful of counts to explore some new radius-to-tricep connection in a way that would be impossible while rock-stepping past each other at 50% higher bpm.
  • in bal-swing, partners are continually oscillating between compression and tension (i.e. every two counts), even while doing “nothing” in closed position.
  • One consequence of this is that quite a few things in balboa (for example, tossouts and outside free turns in lollies, or transitioning between pure bal and out-and-ins) can be lead mostly by the absence of a redirection.
  • Related to that point, in lindy (and wcs) tension and compression generally ramp up gradually to some peak, and then drop off gradually back to zero (e.g. during a sugar push, compression peaks at the moment of redirection, but is smoothly ramping up and down around that point). In contrast, for those release-based moves, bal-swing has tension/compression that builds smoothly to a peak, and then instantly drops to zero.
  • in bal-swing out-and-ins, the lead’s right hand can float off of the follows back during compression (compression happens with the other hand)
  • in wcs, in closed position the lead’s right hand is much further up the follow’s back, in the armpit. This allows the follow to continue to sink/stretch away with the hips during e.g. the anchor.
  • lindy tends to use the highest amount of tension relative to all of the others
  • a fast lindy circle is the only motion I’ve encountered that has a very noticeable amount of centripetal/centrifugal force. Note that e.g. a wcs “ride” is circular and uses tension, but is substantially different in that the tension comes from the partners shifting their weight away from each other (i.e. counterbalance), but not from the partners accelerating around their shared center.

Shape

Lindy involves a lot of rebounding off of endpoints, mostly linear, and mostly tension-based. Canonically in open position, both partners rock step away from each other on one, resulting in rebounding towards and then past each other (to the next stretch).

Bal-swing has a cycle of tension and compression every two counts(!) This can be linear, as in the out-and-in basic, or it can be rotational, as found in lollies. In balboa (bal-swing as well as pure bal) the partnership as a whole is often gradually rotating, orbiting one partner or a common center (in addition to rotation/twisting within each dancers’ body - so there are two levels of rotating-ness in balboa)

West coast swing is linear, like lindy, but has a convention of having not just individual movements be linear, but actually all of those linear movements are lined up on a single slot. It’s also much more stop-and-start (but smoothed out). There are posts and anchors that define a relatively static breathing/recovery space between patterns.

For example, imagine repeated inside turns/passbys/left-side passes. In wcs, the endpoint of the movement away from each other is defined on count 4 (the post), and the max stretch is reached on count 6 (at the end of the anchor). In lindy, the endpoint of the movement is defined on count 6 when tension starts to build, and the max stretch is on count 1 of the next passby. The movement past and away from each other is spread more evenly across the entire available 6 counts.

Wcs tends to have more angled torsos, especially for follows (as part of them being more statically settled in on one side or the other) in open position.

Pure bal and shag both tend to have the partnership drifting across the floor as a unit, though shag is much more mobile/covers more ground.

Blues and fusion tend to be more in place, relatively more concerned with movement within the bodies than movement of the bodies within the space.

Charleston (generic charleston? non-20’s charleston? not sure of the terminology) can also be quite rotational, but without the oscillating compression-tension of balboa. If you watched from above, charleston might look a bit like watching cogs or gears spinning around each other.

House dance can include substantial amounts of floorwork.

Body parts

One differentiator is the emphasis on footwork. From high to low, I would say

  • pure balboa
  • lindy, shag, house, solo jazz
  • wcs, bal-swing
  • blues, fusion

Another is how much dancing is done with the torso (e.g. body rolls)

  • house, wcs, fusion
  • blues, solo jazz
  • lindy, shag, balboa

In wcs, it’s much more common than e.g. in lindy to see leads with both feet planted for substantial lengths of time, and follows are often explicitly committed to sinking into one side or the other through lead/follow mechanics. In contrast, in lindy, each dancer’s legs are generally their own business and more often available for footwork variations.

On the other hand, because wcs is less heavily led on counts 3 and 4, and because the dance is more stationary, it seems that there is more opportunity especially for follows more torso movements/level changes/etc, which might be harder in lindy with higher bpm/more pulse/more momentum/more likelihood of redirection in those middle counts.

In terms of dancing with the arms, of course the partner dances all have less emphasis than the solo dances, because arms are often being used for connection.

In (solo) house dance, arm movement is interesting because it’s very present but relatively subtle - there is often continuous and flowy arm movement, but relatively few dramatic movements (e.g. the hands might almost never go above shoulder level).

Basic step

For my purposes, I define a basic step as

  • rhythmically similar to the standard “real moves” of the dance
  • the partnership may drift/travel slightly across the floor, but the basic step doesn’t really go anywhere.
  • spatial relationship between partners doesn’t change
  • connection between partners is present but minimal
  • can be used to fill time, e.g. while partners converse

Balboa is the standout here for gold standard basics. There are multiple basics, they can be layered with complexity while still being basics, that layering can be done independently by lead and by follow, and they stay interesting for and are used commonly by even advanced dancers. Take a look at this bullet point requirement for advanced classes at Calbal:

  • “Be able to demonstrate musicality and creativity if asked to dance an entire song while only staying in one of the three core Bal basics” In particular, a lot of the expressiveness in pure bal comes from how each dancer places their feet onto the floor and picks them up, e.g. with variations like fans, and that is all available even in simple basics.

Shag likewise has a high-quality basic with lots of footwork variations, though just one basic(?) (footwork stylings notwithstanding)

Lindy has a serviceable basic (or maybe even a few - six or eight count in open or closed, allegedly jig walks) which is great for learning, and enters the mix occassionaly among experienced dancers, but it’s not as rich as for balboa and shag, and you generally wouldn’t find experienced dancers entertaining themselves with long sequences of basics.

Wcs does not have a basic step. It has basic patterns, but those all have nontrivial leading/following happening, people move along the slot, etc, and therefore they can’t fill the same role of neutral filler material.

Blues kind of also has a basic step, but it’s interesting in that there’s less emphasis on “real moves”, and so it’s not really “basic” in relation to anything. It is however a high quality basic in the sense that good dancers can be entertained and expressive without needing to reach for more.

Pulse

There are some clear differences here, but I mostly don’t have much nontrivial to say about them.

  • lindy, bal, shag, blues generally have a pulse
  • wcs generally doesn’t have a pulse (except as a specific musicality choice a few beats at a time)
  • the balboa pulse can carry important information in pure bal. for the same series of steps/weight transfers, changes in the feel of the pulse through the chest connection can indicate what types of step the partner is using (plain/fans/digs/etc).
  • the blues pulse can be in the hips, especially backwards, while the shoulders stay relatively stationary.
  • pulses in lindy and blues are generally “down” pulses, in that the downward component is faster and emphasized, and the upward component is a more gradual recovery. In contrast the pulse in house is more even/symmetric between up and down.
  • house has “jacking”, which is basically a full body pulse. The center of mass moves up and down, the hips transcribe an oval (at the high point of the oval, hips can be moving forward, backward, left, or right), and the shoulders/torso move counter to the hips. The head is not fixed to the torso - rather a relaxed neck allows the head to stay relatively calm/in place.

Lead/follow emphasis

  • Blues has pretty low emphasis on lead/follow mechanics, and high emphasis on individual movement throughout. E.g. when a turn is lead that in the other dances might have an expectation of being a two-count turn, in blues the follow might take two counts - or they might take twelve.
  • Lindy is pretty heavily lead and followed. Footwork is almost always the individual choice of each dancer, through any movement. There are often sections where nothing much is being lead, i.e. “solo jazz (by both partners) while holding hands”, and even breakaways, i.e. “solo jazz (by both partners) while not not even holding hands”
  • Wcs is both very high and very low here. leading often extends to which specific foot the follow is settled into, and which way the torso is angled, which are generally not being explictly lead in lindy. However patterns also have a “fire and forget” aspect to them, where direction and rotation are set up on counts 1 and 2, and then counts 3 and 4 are for the follow to go through however they choose, with an expectation of not being disrupted/redirected.
  • Shag allegedly has the highest degree of lead-follow, where any arbitrary weight shift might be lead at literally any time (though, also true in pure bal?)

Skill requirement

One way to think about this is - if an experienced dancer dances with someone newer, how much does that latter person need to learn until isn’t significantly disruptive to the former?

From higher/more skill requirement to lower:

  • wcs
  • pure bal
  • lindy, bal-swing
  • blues

To some extent, this is the inverse of “lead/follow emphasis”, because individual movement is less impacted by partner skill, while what can be accomplished through a lead/follow connection depends on the partner.

It’s also somewhat inverse of “basic step quality”. Pure bal can feel quite jarring when partners are out of sync, but I count it as more forgiving here than wcs because having a comfortable basic counts for much more.

  • Lindy is the most inter-related of this set of dances. It’s rare to go somewhere where people are dancing lindy and not also see balboa, shag, charleston, and solo jazz being mixed in.
  • Wcs doesn’t have a “solo wcs” analogue (at least, not to nearly the same degree to which solo jazz is a thing), but many individual dancers, especially follows, have other solo dance backgrounds that they draw on.
  • Charleston is interesting in that it’s distinct enough to have its own name and history, but it’s not distinct enough to have its own competitions, events, curriculum. Because it mixes so easily with lindy, charleston gets treated as a subset of lindy rather than an independent dance.

Showiness

  • wcs and lindy are on the flashier end of the spectrum. Wcs puts a higher proportion of the show into the follow than lindy does. In lindy this is more often about footwork, which both dancers can participate in freely (including at the same time). In wcs, the big moments are more likely to be something related to the upper body, and counterbalanced connections with some interesting hold
  • in wcs, dancers somewhat regularly mime fragments of lyrics (e.g. point at partner when song says something about “you”)
  • in contrast, balboa, especially pure bal, is relatively more about dancing with the partner and less about dancing for an audience. An untrained observer watching pure bal might struggle to notice what is even happening.
  • this affects what it means to be musical in each dance. In lindy or wcs, this is more likely to mean hitting some pose, or layering specific solo movements over the partnered baseline. In balboa, it’s more likely to be some rythym and momentum variation between the partners.
  • house dance is visually interesting, but not visually dramatic relative to e.g. many choreographed solo dances. For example, the arms may be continually in motion (much more so than e.g. arms of partner dancers), but almost never rising above the shoulders or hitting particular instants in the music (and the music itself is correspondingly more about continuous rythym than sharp moments).

Learning and education

Partner dancing

Group classes

The main thing to say here is that group classes are one of the main ways that people learn, and group classes are inherently deeply (, deeply, deeply) flawed. They are a way to progress, but a painstakingly inefficient one.

The good thing about group classes is that they provide a little bit of everything

  • people to practice with
  • material to learn / curriculum
  • feedback

In particular, group classes are the most accessible / lowest-effort way to have someone to practice with, which is a very important thing. That said…

Feedback: group classes are a garbage source of feedback.

  • there is no time to give feedback to partners.
  • even if there was time, feedback is much less effective when both people are learning something new at the same time.
  • even if there was good feedback to give and time to give it, the cultural convention is strongly against giving feedback in classes.
  • feedback from instructors is aimed at the group as a whole, and feedback is much less effective when it’s not personalized.
  • feedback from instructors is verbal and visual, and feedback is much less effective without physically connecting.

Practice: group classes are a garbage source of practice for leaders and for followers, in overlapping but also distinct ways.

For followers: it’s impossible to learn to interpret and respond to how something is lead when the leader isn’t yet capable of leading it. In particular, because followers have ears, they also know what mini choreo the teacher is providing, and so classes have the effect of training followers to fix/overinterpret/anticipate things that are not actually being led - which is a bad habit that then has to be unlearned(!), often in further group classes(!!!)

For leaders: it’s likewise impossible to learn how to communicate something correctly when the follow can’t yet follow the lead honestly (at least it’s pretty widely acknowledged that follows executing the class choreo deprives leads of the vital feedback that they didn’t actually lead the thing).

Also, when social dancing, if something doesn’t go as planned, a very important skill for leading is to smoothly recover and make a different plan that fits whatever the new situation is. Group classes promote the exact opposite - try to power through mistakes as if they never happened to keep up with the choreo. Productive practice with a partner or private lesson would mean working on the broken foundations before trying to build on top of them.

Material: material in group classes is generally fine. Looking up one of a million videos on youtube and copying things is often 90% as good though (and often better, because you can choose what to work on).

Alternative??

My thought on a better systemization of practice which doesn’t require infinite money for professional private lessons would be based on a pyrimid of feedback.

I.e., slice the student population into bands as is currently standard. But then, rather than have students in a given band learn with each other and at the same time, each student gets 10-minute slots of practice and feedback with a student one level up in the other role (e.g. a level 1 lead gets feedback for 10 minutes with a level 2 follow, and in that time the focus is 100% on the level 1 student. The level 2 follow then turns around and receives feedback for 10 minutes from a level 3 lead, etc.).

Because there are fewer dancers in each successive slice, each person would spend more time giving feedback to the level below than receiving feedback from the level above, e.g. at a 2-1 ratio.

This is somewhat inspired by the insanely popular mini-privates that balhaus does, but with the multiple levels being a way to scale it further.

Independent one-on-one practice

The message that isn’t really ever said out loud is that to improve, it’s really useful to find 1-1 practice partners, and it’s each individual dancer’s responsibility to find those practice partners themselves. 1-1 practice sessions are IMO the best time-and-money-efficient way to learn. Some reasons are

  • it’s possible to give and receive feedback, and then to actually spend time iterating on that feedback.
  • full control of the pacing. When something is confusing or doesn’t work on the first couple tries in a class setting, it’s mostly just tough luck. When it doesn’t work in a practice session, it’s usually possible to spend some time trying things out until it starts to work (which also feels very satisfying).

When finding a practice partner, it’s not as simple as “find the most skilled partner possible”. It’s actually more important to find someone with compatible learning goals. In particular, a lead will have a much bigger difference in their effective skill level between moves they know and moves they don’t know, whereas beyond a certain point follows effectively “know” all the moves. So, if a lead is working on new vocabulary, it might make sense to practice with a follow that hasn’t yet reached that point, so that both people benefit.

Another great way to balance out move-centric practice is if both partners are interested in both roles, and can simply take turns leading and following everything.

Solo dancing

Learning solo dance is great because

  • practicing solo can be very productive (shocking)
  • the problems of partner dance group classes don’t apply

It’s also a great setting to apply the skill of simplifying what the teacher gives enough to be challenging-but-possible, because simplifying your own movements doesn’t inhibit anyone else.

Learning multiple dances

Sometimes it can be difficult to know what to work on. A big hammer that can be used here is to start learning another type of dance, because finding things to work on is easier as a beginner when the answer is “literally everything”.

Learning a second dance is easier than the first, but not monotonically easier. I would say there are at least three stages, relative to a true beginner

  • an initial head start, from already knowing about connection, rythym, how to take steps, etc.
  • then a penalty, because the specific details of connection, etc. (including even the abstractions of how people think about the dance) are actually different, and it takes extra time to “unlearn” existing habits. In this stage, it can be hard to access more advanced movements, because the mismatch in mechanics gets in the way.
  • then a boost again afterwards, because many of the more advanced movements can be ported over “for free”

Learning a third (fourth, …) is easier than learning a second, for a specific reason - “unlearning” effort starts to carry over. E.g.

  • someone who dances only lindy hop may have a strong dependency on taking rock steps all the time.
  • if they then learn wcs, they’ll learn how to stretch into the anchor instead
  • if they then learn balboa, the anchor won’t necessarily carry over to e.g. out-and-ins, but not-rock-stepping will carry over.

Said a little more generally, one measure of breadth of experience is to ask “what have you danced without?” Have you danced without rock steps? Without 4/4 music? Without an open position? Without a partner?

Miscellaneous

  • It’s often difficult to see progress in the very short term (like the past week), but so far I’ve always been able to see substantial improvement looking back over a 3 month window.

  • Also, some forms of progress are easier to see than others. Learning a specific move or variation with a well-known name is one of the easiest forms of progress to see, and probably gradual improvements in quality are one of the hardest. Sometimes it can be helpful to try to explicitly connect the two, by finding a situation where something vague about quality turns into something tangible.

    As a specific example of that, maybe at 130 bpm it’s hard for someone to really feel their swingout being overly circular, or to be really excited about spending time training to make it more linear. But at 200 bpm, that circularity might be the difference between being able to do swingouts at all or not, and the feedback is much clearer.

Miscellaneous

  • One specific comparison I make is that dancing is completely opposite as an activity from climbing. In climbing the fun and interesting part is often about being at the limit of what you can do - trying to climb some route ten times and then finally getting it on the eleventh, at which point it becomes boring and it’s time to move on.

    Whereas in dance, the idea is more to be doing things that are easy (for the dancers in question), so that creativity and expressiveness can be layered on top. If someone leads a complicated turn that “works” one time out of ten, then even on that “success” it will feel and look jarring, and it should have really just been avoided.

  • In the rest of the world, you might have a friendly conversation with someone you don’t know that well, and give a hug to someone that you do. At dance events that can be suprisingly backwards - the default interaction is to dance with someone, and it’s actually exchanging a few words without dancing that’s a sign someone is a good friend.

  • I find it interesting that because south bay dancers tend to drive long distances to events, they also tend to carpool, and that contributes to people getting to know each other better in a way that doesn’t happen in some of the other local scenes where people might separately take short bus rides.

Some things I like about dance

I like that at big events, the incredible dancers who win the competitions and the people who are teaching are very often the same people.

I like the space available for individual expression. One concrete way that I think about this is that at big events, it’s so common to see people on the social floor who, sure they would lose to all the pros in a competition, but they are doing a few things that no one else in the room is doing and it looks so good.

I like learning, I like teaching, and I really like that dance is something where many or even most people never stop doing doing both. There’s always something new to show or ask a friend about.

I like that, afaik, dance is the only creative endeavor that one can go practice on a random evening with a hundred strangers. Similarly, it’s one of few things where it is just as natural to perform on a stage as it is to do for fun at home alone.

Wrap-up

Thanks for reading! If you know of other writings/discussion on this kind of topic, especially by people who know more, let me know - I haven’t come across any yet.