Part of the enjoyment of dancing salsa, bachata and just about every partner dance style, is the ability to execute a proper and effective basic movement via leading or following...
yet...
unfortunately...
I watch in amazement everytime I see a teacher teach basic moves, "Ok, watch what I do...ok, now do it", without emphasizing and explaining in details - the essentials...
They start a lesson by performing the basic steps...
forward, backward, side to side...
What they missed in explaining?
- the ball (and toes) of the foot's placements
- the dynamics of the steps
- the timing of the steps
- the flexing of the leg muscles
- not to mention the bending of the knees
Do they even know why the counting is 1,2,3...5,6,7 with missing 4 and 8 in salsa?
Or why the counting is 1,2,3,4 and 5,6,7 and 8 and 1 in bachata?
Beginning students had been taking classes from Maestro Z, with this partner Suzy Q, for 3 years now...but since Z never really explained and broke down the details I enumerated above, the students can't performed the basic steps properly. Some skip a step, another is out of timing. How about her? She does her basic forward backward steps with "wooden legs", and she looks like she has broken hips!
Yet these students had been learning and accumulating 1 million fancy moves taught by Maestro Z and Suzy Q...
When Z's students go to the clubs or any dance socials, people they danced with try to tolerate them. And as a result, people they dance with get injured or worse, they get elbowed in the face or bruise their ankles and feet from getting stepped on due to improper basic steps...
It's not the student's fault. Maestro Z and Suzy Q have a communist dance studio - no other teachers can teach. Students may not defect to other competing dance schools or else they will suffer severe punishment by getting banned and disowned by Maestro Z's dance community.
When Teachers such as Z and Q fail to teach proper dance techniques, it's not because they didn't want to, or they were lazy to break down techniques, it's because that is how they were *trained when they were just beginners, or worse, they never took serious dance training before from a teacher that emphasizes good dance foundation before even teaching fancy moves and a gazillion patterns and dips.
There is the notion of "I only dance for fun". Such notion is partly true, but the fact of the matter is, not everyone is having fun in dancing especially when they're dancing with you.
Another problem is with the students being impatient of mastering the basics. The only way you can master a technique is by constantly practicing it repetitively until you can no longer...
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” - Bruce Lee
*There is a difference between dance training and dance classes. Dance training develops dancers while classes teaches students tp dance. It is then up to the students to improve by perfecting what they've learned.
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