My girlfriend and I have been taking swing dancing lessons lately. We both enjoy music and dancing and decided it would be fun to learn to actually dance together through swing.
While I enjoy the actual dancing, one of my favorite aspects of swing has been the process of learning it.
I've always had a bit of natural ability with music-related subjects. They come easily to me. When I used to go out dancing I would just hit the dancefloor because the music sounded good. Not the case with swing dancing. Swing requires you to learn the moves before you can dance. This was a bit of a struggle for me at first, because I just wanted to be able to move freely to the music.
The first few weeks of classes we had to learn the six-count and eight-count step patterns. This wasn't too hard except that the counts are mixed throughout the series of the dance and partners are required to switch back and forth multiple times very quickly.
Another part of the process was learning the moves well enough to be able to do them in a series of combinations. This required mastering the moves first and then setting them up for the combination. Finally, upon knowing all of this the leader can freely choose a move or combo on the fly, this the best part of the dance.
Our class meets once a week for an hour which is not enough time to really master anything. We both decided during the first class that we wanted to take swing dancing seriously and excel at it. The challenge was that our weekly schedules are very busy with work and life that we didn't have much shared time to practice.
We thought it would be a cool idea to practice using a method we'd both read about called visualization to get the moves down and reach our goal. This process has been written about extensively and was made famous by a basketball study by Dr. Blaslotto of The University of Chicago. During the week we both individually spent some time before going to sleep rehearsing the moves in our minds.
The visualization practice proved to be really effective and we're both very happy with the results. The first time we reached the point where we could perform multiple moves and combinations and dance to an entire song we were both giddy with excitement.
The practice and visualization paid off and I learned about learning in the process.
