Take a couple of hours - or in the case of this vlog, about 5 minutes - to understanding your options before choosing, and you can save yourself hundreds of hours of wasted time.
Novice dancers choose the first instructor a studio sticks in front of them, without knowing if another could have taught them in half the time. And many home-schooled dancers rely on YouTube for their information, then spend years unlearning the many bad habits they picked up along the way.
If you decide to learn, or at least supplement your learning from home, it's important that you understand that YouTube isn't your only option. It's not even your only FREE option.
Transcript:
Hi guys! My name is Ian Crewe. I'm an instructor at the Joy of Dance Centre in Toronto Ontario, and the creator of Social Ballroom Dance: Where you can learn your dance, at your place, on your schedule.
Now, we talked last week about the benefits of learning to dance outside of a traditional studio setting, so now the question is: How do we do that?
By far the best way to learn is through instructional videos. I mean, reading about dancing is kind of like reading about rock climbing: It's going to be very very different in practice.
There are some images, true, which can help you to achieve a certain look in specific patterns, but dancing is about more than just going from one picture line to the next. It's about that flow through, that movement.
There's three different types of videos out there: There's your social media sites like YouTube and Daily Motion, then you have your dance blogs like addicted2salsa, and then your premium content sites like - well, like socialballroom.dance. let's look at the pros and cons of each one.
So first you have your social media sites, which is primarily YouTube when it comes to videos. Now the obvious pro of this is there is a LOT of free online content! I mean, everybody is uploading videos, whether it's competitions, whether it's instructional dance videos, whether it's just dance advice from people in the industry; there's lots of potentially great material for you out there.
The downside is most of that material tends to be of a lower quality, so you're going to spend a lot of time and energy sifting through all that information, trying to find those diamonds in the rough. So if you do decide to go along this route, I urge you to be as discerning as you can.
When somebody is explaining something on YouTube, try it out! Practice it - actually when somebody's explaining something anywhere, make sure that it feels good for your body. I'm all about learning to dance in a way that's good for the individual. There is no cookie cutter way that everybody has to conform to.
And over time you're going to get a better and better sense of what style of dancing, what style of explanation works best for you. Kind of like when you're choosing an instructor who works best for you.
There's also a few good YouTube channels that you can check out. For the West Coast swingers, WestCoastSwingOnline offers some great video content and for international ballroom dancers, Passion4Dancing has some great HD videos for beginners as well. But let me know if you find out any other so I can pass those on as well.
Now, the second option is our dance blogs: These tend to be produced by instructors who have gone out and social danced, and now they're making these blogs as a way to boost their popularity.
They tend therefore to be focused on certain nightclub style dances. So you might get one blog that's devoted entirely to salsa, or entirely to West Coast Swing, or entirely to Argentine tango.
The plus side of this is that you tend to get higher quality content, and the instructor is more experienced. But the downside is that there's not a lot of them out there. In fact, as of right now I don't believe there are any ballroom dance sites that offer free content that, you know, is well laid out, and there's a decent quantity of it. But let me know if you hear about some that I can pass on.
And finally, you have your premium content sites. Now the obvious benefit is, because these sites are being funded, they can give you the best dance experience - you can get the highest quality videos, you're going to get the best layout, the most useful instructions, from the most talented or the most experienced dance teachers. so it's a really great way to get that premium content.
The downside of course, is that you do have to pay for it, and because of that I don't recommend it if you are not yet in a place where you want to make, you know, a consistent effort to learn.
If you already have some experience learning either from videos or from learning at the studio, your next question might be: "Well, how do I work practicing these patterns and techniques into my daily routine?" And this is something that we are going to cover in our next video.
So if you had any questions about our video today, please don't hesitate to message me on my Facebook fan page, Ballroom Dancers Anonymous, or you can email me at ian@socialballroom.dance, again that's ian@socialballroom.dance. Have yourself a fabulous week, and until next time, happy dancing!