There is a cultural fiction, an “urban legend,” a pervasive myth about the nature of human ability in regard to dancing that keeps A LOT of people from believing that they can learn to dance. Many of us think that there are people who CAN dance, and people who CAN’T. Just naturally, from birth—they think that human beings have the inherent ability to dance or they don’t. I am here to tell you—from experience—that this assumption is just WRONG. Why do we make this assumption about dance but not about other muscle memory skills? You never run into the belief that some people naturally know how to golf, and others don’t, a belief that golfing is just an in-born trait and there’s no changing it (and trust me, it’s MUCH more fun to be a beginner dancer than a beginner golfer!). For all other hobbies and skills, we realize that you need instruction to learn how to do them. Dancing is simply a muscle memory skill like any other, just like golf, or skiing, or any other sport, or learning to play a musical instrument, or driving a car. Did you know that backing out of a parking space is one of the most complex clusters of motor skills we deploy on an everyday basis? It feels like second nature to most of us… and yet, we are well aware that we weren’t born with the ability to back out of a parking space.
Dancing is exactly the same. No one is born with the ability to do social partner dance styles. Even us dance teachers did not spring forth from the womb ready to do a ChaChaCha! Every person who dances a social partner style has had to take their first class or lesson, has had to learn the basic step after not knowing it previously, has had to make the leap from being a person who did not know how to dance to someone who does! This fact should be obvious, but it isn’t. The myth of born dancers vs. born non-dancers persists!
Why? It’s because of freestyle dancing. The dance style we encounter most frequently in 21st century American culture is freestyle dancing. Like all dance styles, it can be learned, refined and honed through high-level skill and technique. But most of the people you see doing it at your average family wedding just jump right in and do it without any training. In this way, it is the most accessible style of dancing; no lessons required, you just walk onto the dance floor and start moving. Some people are very comfortable doing this, some people are NOT even remotely comfortable doing this. Some people look good freestyle dancing, some people look passable, some people look goofy. Freestyle dancing might be one of the most accessible styles, but it’s also one of the hardest to coordinate well. You have to figure out what to do with each one of your limbs individually, you have to figure out how to orient your torso, whether to move your hips independently from your ribs and shoulders… that’s a lot of stuff to knit together into a cohesive whole. Some people do have a more natural feel for how to do this—but it probably comes from an ability to watch and mimic other good dancers, not from in-born skills. Other people just don’t care… every family has some version of the “goofy uncle,” the person at every wedding who loves to dance and gyrates as he pleases… maybe YOU don’t want to look like him when you dance, but you at least have to give him credit. He loves to dance, he’s having a great time… and even if he looks goofy, at least he OWNS it! He never comes to see me for dance lessons because he’s perfectly happy with his goofy grooves.
It’s the rest of you, watching from the sidelines, petrified of hopping on the dance floor because you don’t know what to do: YOU are the people I’m talking to. You probably believe you’re a hopeless case, that you can never learn to dance, that you simply don’t have what it takes.
I have taught dance for over 15 years, and there is only ONE thing that makes the difference between people who CAN learn to dance and people who can’t. It is NOT natural ability. Some people may have the ability to learn faster, or catch on more quickly, but there is no innate quality that makes or breaks your ability to learn to dance.
Over the course of these 15 years, I have been teaching the general public, people who are regular, established-in-life adults. I almost never teach school-aged kids, so do not assume my experience is based on young prodigies and dance phenoms. During the height of my studio teaching days, people would ask me: “What age group do you teach?” My answer was: “My youngest student is 40.” The majority of my students started with me as complete beginners with ZERO dance experience, and 90% of them were empty-nesters when they started, people between the ages of 50 and 75. They were all normal adults with ordinary jobs, some of them white-collar professionals like doctors and lawyers, some of them blue-collar laborers like welders and mechanics, some of them self-made entrepreneurs like landlords or business owners. I even taught a bail-bondsman who told me to call him if I ever got arrested! (good to know, I guess, but I’m doing my best to stay on the straight and narrow). They were all regular people, just like you, without any special background or abilities to prime their dance learning.
It didn’t matter who they were or why they got started, it didn’t matter if they were physically fit or out-of-shape. Sometimes a previous athletic background was helpful for learning certain aspects of dance more quickly, but the ability to learn or not learn never hinged on their history of acquired or natural skills.
The #1 key to success in dancing, the factor that I observed time after time after time, the quality that had the most power to make or break a dance hobby was…
Wanting to learn.
That’s it! That was the key to success in every single student I have ever taught. A student who WANTS to learn, who is independently driven to succeed in dance lessons WILL succeed in dance lessons. And will HAVE FUN doing it! That’s a lot more than I can say for golf… I’m a relatively capable and athletic person, but I was SHOCKED by how difficult it was simply not to be an ABYSMAL golfer. Trust me, you’ll have MUCH more fun being a beginner dancer than I had as a beginner at golf!
But wait, doesn’t every person who signs up for a dance lesson WANT to learn? Doesn’t that fundamental reality taint my sample group? No. You would be surprised how many people come in for lessons who don’t actually want to learn, and every student I teach falls somewhere on a progressive continuum of people who feel strongly compelled to learn vs. people who have very little interest. The people with the strongest desire to learn are the most effective learners, and the people with the least desire make the least efficient progress. Less-interested students show up most often in a couple; one member of the couple is much more motivated to learn than the other; one spouse is super-driven by a love of dance, and the other spouse just wants to make his or her partner happy. Don’t get me wrong—making your partner happy can be solid motivation in-and-of-itself—I’ve seen lots of reluctant beginners eventually warm up to the hobby and end up loving it despite originally being cajoled by a spouse. Sometimes, though, I have experienced teaching one spouse who is largely uninterested but keeps attending lessons to keep the peace. One time, I actually taught a couple where BOTH spouses didn’t want to learn to dance. Their son was getting married to a high-society girl whose family was, reportedly, all avid ballroom dancers and this couple was convinced they would appear woefully out-of-place if they couldn’t dance at the wedding. It was clear, during every lesson, that they treated it like a chore and didn’t want to be there. Their learning was hard and uncomfortable, moving forward in fits and starts. They learned a few dances and a few steps in each dance, so even with their heavy disinterest, they still learned SOMETHING. The same is true of all less-than-interested learners I’ve taught. They still learn, and if they keep taking lessons, they keep making progress. It’s just slow progress.
Luckily, most dance students do fall toward the other end of the learning desire continuum. The more motivated they are, the better their progress! Partly, this is due to the fact that wanting to learn motivates them to dance more often. The more lessons they take, the more socials they attend, the more opportunities they find to dance, to practice dancing, or even to THINK about dancing… all of it combines to support faster and more efficient learning.
If you truly WANT to learn, you will dedicate more time and attention to dancing. If you truly WANT to learn, that desire will also give you the grit to get through tougher phases of learning. Sometimes, when you’re working hard building muscle memory, it doesn’t FEEL like you’re making progress. Many long-term dance students will recognize that their learning doesn’t always SEEM to progress at the same pace. Sometimes it feels like learning slows down, like you hit a plateau. In reality, as long as you’re consistently dancing, then you’re consistently building muscle memory, but sometimes the FEELING of learning is that it speeds up and slows down at different times. Your desire to learn will carry you through those seemingly slow times.
Truly WANTING to learn will also carry you along when things are hard or uncomfortable. In order to improve or change your dancing, it is often necessary to re-engineer aspects of your muscle memory. Making these changes can feel uncomfortable. Making a change in your dancing, making your style or technique different, will usually result in a phase where the new facets of your technique feel alien. The first step to improvement is change, and whenever we change something in our dancing it will feel different, and more often than not, those differences feel weird. You have to power through this awkward phase of dance “growing pains” if you want to get to the other side where you’re a better dancer. If you don’t truly WANT to make those changes, you won’t. I’ve had students who ask me for more advanced technique, who say they want to look a certain way or dance a certain way, but when it comes down to doing the consistent, uncomfortable hard work to get there… it turns out they don’t want it so much after all. And that’s fine! I can teach anyone to become the dancer they TRULY WANT to be. It’s okay to want to be a cool, casual social dancer who has fun moves, but not flashy style or competition-grade technique. The main point I’m making here is that it’s always the WANTING that makes the difference. The students who have the wanting to learn will learn because that desire drives them forward.
The good news, all around, is that you will learn to dance, no matter where you fall on the “wanting” spectrum. As long as you want to dance at least enough to come consistently to lessons and socials, you WILL learn. You can want to be an amazing dancer, you can want to be a fun and functional dancer, you can want to be a basic dancer with a few comfortable moves. The #1 key to your success is that basic WANTING, the motivation and drive to do it. If you want to learn to dance, don’t wait any longer because you think you can’t do it. Find a personal teacher and get started with lessons; turn that WANTING into a lifetime of dancefloor fun!
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