A lot of dancers find slow dancing to be difficult. There’s an easy tendency to rush, which is due to a number of factors, but one is simply that it is hard to move slowly. Why? well, because in that slow movement, you need to balance, and balance for a while (because it’s slow!) This exercise is going to explore how to improve your balance and use it as a key part of your dance, in the form of weight shifts.
It’s worth mentioning that weight shifts are useful for more than just slow dancing. They’re one of the main ways to communicate in dance, although they don’t get much attention before you get to slow dancing. For leads, having strong, clear weight shifts is important because it informs one’s partner what foot you are on, so they can match. For follows, having a clear, strong weight shift allows your partner to tell what foot you’re on and use it to inform the next move. The best leads always know what foot their partner is on and use that to shape the dance in ways it otherwise couldn’t.
This exercise is hard. It’s a new skill and takes a while to learn and even more time to practice. It’s something to return to over and over throughout your practice as you improve. This document is written in such a way that you can return to it as you progress through weigh shift tech to learn more and see more about how the skills are applied.
This exercise also strips out a lot of the other tools we use to communicate in the dance — the pulse, timing, the music. But by focusing down on just the weight shifts, you can sharpen that skill, and when you add back in the other elements of the dance, things will work better than they do in the exercise.
A brief aside for acknowledgement, this exercise was adapted from a private lesson with Stefan and Elaine of Seattle (they recommended turning it into a Hopcats exercise), who in turn adapted it from Jo Hoffberg’s Lindy Tech. This exercise in the form of this document was primarily written by Patrick Taylor with strong input from Cheryl Danner.
In order to have good weight shifts in partnership, you need to have good weight shifts solo. To do this, you want to form a ‘strong pillar’ on one side of your body. Check out the video below:
Success in these exercises isn’t ‘we did the move’, it’s ‘do both partners feel what is happening, and is the move really being followed and led’? To help with that, success criteria are given to each section below to help get a sense of when things are working.
To help with that, leads should use arbitrary timing when trying each step, with no music playing. That is to say the time at which the move starts should be random, and not rhythmic in any way. Guessing when the thing will happen is not part of the exercise — it’s about waiting until it is felt. If you do the steps with consistent timing, it can become to easy to ‘guess’ when something will happen and act on that, which can lead to false positive results. It’s also recommended to mix up what is being led, for the same reason.
In contrast to that, after learning a few of the sections below without music, it’s wise to try and take what you learned from the exercise and bring it into the dance. If you do any blues dancing, simple weight shifts should seem immediately applicable. Check out the clips from Stefan and Elaine at the bottom if you want an example of it being danced.