Your Dancing is a Result of the Exercises You Do

It’s pretty simple really. Your dancing is a result of the exercises you do. Practicing the steps or your choreography may not help you at all. Good dancing is a product of good movement. Even the best choreography can be danced poorly – boring, lacking in dynamic change, unhealthy movement, etc. What matters is the quality of how it’s done, what gets added to it from yourself, from the exercises you do, from your personal character, from the body training.

This has been known for a long time in ballet, modern, jazz, African, acting, and any number of other classical forms. Seventy to ninety percent of the classes and training there focuses on basic movement, basic exercises, and less on the final form of choreography or the dialog or whatever. Why is it that so many ballroom classes, teachers, and students still are naïve to this and just practice choreography?

Some people have figured that out obviously. I love a quote from Karen Hardy from an educational video when she was dancing with Bryan Watson: “What you see at the end of the day is not what we’re actually working on in the studio, but it becomes that at the end of the day.”

Here’s a quick mind-map of just a smattering of some of the exercises one could do for Latin…