Know Thyself: getting a movement practice to strengthen your west coast swing

West Coast Swing is an incredibly difficult dance to master. Just in terms of a functioning lead-follow partnership: being able to understand not just your own body's movement but another's as well, well enough to signal or read signals in a largely open and free-form framework of connection. Learning to function with the variety of different partners sprung from a non syllabus dance with many different schools of thought... it's staggering to comprehend what champion wcs dancers are capable of doing. 

There are a lot of factors that affect each individual when it comes to how easily they pick up the dance, too. I'll try to explore and write about as many of them as possible in the future. But one of the ones always mentioned is "dance background". That is, having done other partner or solo dances before starting wcs grants you an enormous advantage. 

A few times, someone has told me that "it's easy for you, you're talented" (because of my reaching a certain competitive level, generally). My response is always that I'm not--west coast swing comes slowly to me and it's the hardest thing that I've ever done--but I do have a lot of natural advantages. 

'Natural Advantages' is how I think about other activities that positively impact someone's ability to do wcs. Doing other dances first is a big one, but there are a lot of other ways to give yourself a bit of a running start. 

I'd consider the following the trifecta of 'helping learn west coast swing':
-Musical background.
-Physical background. 
-Activities that get you moving with someone else.

For me, my prior dance background was really casual. But luckily I can check all three of the above boxes. Martial arts growing up, 12 years of classical violin, 10 years of strength training (pulling triple bodyweight deadlifts and doing one arm chinups will teach you where most everything in your body is...) plus, years as a personal trainer getting to understand other people's movement. 

If you don't have prior dance experience I'd recommend against learning another partner dance concurrently with wcs. But, you can use your other free time to try to stack up your natural advantages in order to speed up your learning of wcs in a big way. 



Musical: Listen to music! All different genres. Learn to play an instrument or sing. Something like piano wherein the instrument has more than one line of melody to keep track of would be ideal. Learning to improvise well (I never did) will give you an understanding of musical structure, too. 

Physical: Get to know your own body, in a way that's safe and repeatable. For example, if you have prior ankle injuries don't try to take up long distance running, but swimming might be an option. Obviously I'm a proponent of people working out, but if that isn't enjoyable for you there are still tons of ways you can learn to move your body. Climbing, yoga, adult gymnastics, pole or aerial classes, learning to play a team sport... anything will help. Do the activity mindfully and learn about your muscles and your balance. Not only will this help with the activity itself, but it'll increase its carryover to your dance. 

Moving with someone else: of course these activities also involve your own body, but something that gets you moving with another person will  be especially useful. Any form of martial arts will help--grappling arts will teach you more about moving with and responding to another person's touch, striking arts will help you with reading someone and responding visually, and distance control. Something like acroyoga would also be a great idea. 

Solo dance: Another partner dance might be confusing to learn alongside wcs but solo dances will cover two of the above bases, getting to know your own body and getting some experience with music. 




You'll notice that a lot of high level wcs dancers in the community do solo dance work, and have a physical practice of some sort for general health/crosstraining purposes. Plus, lots of them have some of the above natural advantages even if they started doing wcs at a young age. I believe that learning your own body (it's your home for existence, after all) is both fun and extremely rewarding; but even if you just do it for your dance you owe it to yourself to get a movement practice. Wcs is just too challenging to face without getting some natural advantages on your side. Plus, you'll have fun along the way! 


https://youtube.com/@ArisDeMarcoWCS 

https://www.instagram.com/arisdemarco.floortime/

arisdemarco@gmail.com

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