The dancing instructor looks kind of like this. We don't do those steps though.

Yes, that totally weirds me out as well.

It does not wierd me out, but I am not a musician. What gets me is turns/direction change. I can dance facing one direction, or in more or less a straight line or continuous circle, but when I turn around I tend to loose my bearings.

I should go to dance workshop tonight. Truth be told, it took me a week to physically recover enough to attempt it again. No beer, no partners, just two hours of hardcore madness.

Good for you for going to dance school and making the girlfriend smiley!

I think it's the equivalent of, say, not wearing head-to-toe orange. You don't want to be all matchy-matchy with the music; working on a slightly different rhythm makes the dancing a bit less predictable or plodding. The music becomes something your bodies play with, rather than blindly follow.

Even with dances that match the beat of the music, dancers tend to play around with holding steps a little longer on one beat, then rushing a few steps together on the next few beats, then holding something longer... I assume there must be a musician equivalent? I've always thought of it as "flirting with the music."

That's what makes dancing so much fun. If every move you make were timed perfectly with every measure, you'd have dancing that got pretty boring pretty fast. Think "Macarena."

Instead, when you do a six- or eight-count dance above 4/4 time music, you get syncopation. You can use your body movements to punctuate the music. Sometimes you'll wrap up a big move on the last count in a measure and that will result in a wonderful, spot-on final flourish. Sometimes your move ends on count 2, and you start a new move on count 3, and that lets you "swing" over the change in measure, which lends the motion and vitality to the dance.

I know swing better than anything, but the jitterbug/swing basic step is a six-count step and it's almost always done to 4/4 music. It's the mismatch that allows for all the creative improvisational posisbilities in swing. If you were stomping around exactly on the beat all the time, it would be incredibly dull and marchlike.

Have fun with it! You don't say what kind of musician you are, but if you've ever done any drumming, compare it to that. You can carry on two rhythms at once - the music you're tracking by measures, and the body rythm you're tracking by count.

The music: ///*///*///*///*////*///*

Your body: /////*/////*/////*/////*


See how you get a big punctuation on the 12th beat when the end of your step sequence falls at the end of a measure? And how your steps "swing" over the change between measures? It creates the flooooow.

Syncopation! I knew there was a word for what I was trying to talk about.

I miss swing dancing. In order to continue it out here, I feel like I'd have to learn West Coast swing/lindy, and I've had rather bad luck with that in the past. For me, it's the totally asymmetrical moves that trip me up (sometimes literally. Though the only time I've gone down on the dance floor was during a waltz. Backwards and fast and spinning don't combine well for me!).

I had also resolved to go out and do more salsa dancing this year, and that's happened exactly once. Maybe that'll be my summer resolution...