We can do better: a west coast swing teaching manifesto

initial disclaimer: this is all about one on one private lessons. Group classes especially at a beginner level are more than a little different

West coast swing isn’t like most other dances. Even for non-syllabus, ‘street’ dances there are usually only a few clear technical variants at a high level of the dance. As such, teaching ‘good dancing’ especially from a technical standpoint tends to be a bit more objective than it is in our case. Our brains working the way that they do, we tend to teach from one of just a few perspectives:

 

• 1.       Here’s what I do, it works for me, thus, it should work for you too
• 2.        This is what my teacher told me, it works for them (maybe not yet for me), so it should work for you too
• 3.       I haven’t tried this at all but so and so said it and I think they’re smart, so you should listen to them

 

                Now, these are entirely natural! We want to connect and pass on either our own personal experience, or share from experts who we trust and look up to. However, there are going to be some limitations if we only use one of those three approaches. First, there's the literal fact that we often have more than one single right answer in our dance. And students often misunderstand what their teachers say; their lack of perspective and experience tends to dilute the original message and make understanding it more difficult. 

When I was growing up, both my parents were philosophy professors. It looked like many of their debates/presented papers/books were just ‘he said/she said’ when it came to whoever’s point of view they were discussing. This seemed entirely asinine to me, not to mention depressingly uninspired. And this is what often happens in WCS as well. Instructors of varying levels often don’t bring all that much independent thought to the table and any discussion becomes just the appeal to higher authority.

This will not be the most constructive, helpful way to spread our dance or pass it on. 

 By all means, we should endeavor to learn and share from those who came before us--but at the very least our understanding has to go beyond repeating  what we've heard especially when it comes to specific words, phrases and cues. The advice to learn or explore by teaching is a really great one. Just like for an exam in school, having to rephrase and explain what you've learned several times to different people can be invaluable for your own understanding. Doing this, teaching with mindful purpose, is going to be better for everyone.

 

This is a very different problem that I’d like to unpack in the future but just in passing I’d like to say: it’s also popular for some teachers to say, essentially, because ‘everything is made up and the points don’t matter’ in terms of our competitions (I do love this quote, thank you Whose Line is it Anyway) that our entire dance more or less works the same. And this becomes why should we really try to have swing in the dance, have a slot, etc. I personally believe that the nihilistic ‘do whatever the hell you want, no one cares’ is at least as lazy as the parrot method. Yes, I’m thinking of a specific teacher I once had, no they aren’t in the community anymore; but I think that bits and pieces of this attitude tend to creep into some instruction and it’s not at all helpful. Innovation comes from pushing to expand the boundaries, not throwing them all out entirely.

                

               

                I like martial arts analogies. I can’t use them very often to teach, simply because I haven’t worked with a lot of competitive martial artists or veterans of combat sports. But this is how I see west coast swing as… a whole thing. Dance? Activity? Whatever. This is our current meta. WCS is very similar to mixed martial arts as those sports began to evolve. The whole idea there was creating an arena with a limited ruleset in which competitors could use any number of more formal arts or, if it worked, try something entirely different within the broad umbrella of the guidelines for the sport. At first, competitors were almost entirely specialized in a single art or combat form. As MMA evolved and its reach grew broader, athletes were forced to become more well-rounded. Coaches had to develop a perspective that took lots of different potential theories and methods into account, which grew the sport to a more advanced level.

                This is a clear progression. For us to grow west coast swing—both our own individual dance as well as our ability to help students, friends, etc.—we need more informed perspectives. We need to better educate ourselves. We need to teach to the individual. 

 

There is a right answer for every student. What is going to work best for them, right now, and the way with which we explain it for their ease of understanding.

 

Which skill option or variant to give them as a teacher depends on the following:

-What's holding them back and needs alteration

-What’s most natural for them out of the potential upgrades 

-What’s compatible with their existing habits/technique

 

How we teach ideally takes these into consideration:

-cueing/visualizations that help them best replicate the skill

-explaining the skill, both the variant we’re giving them and perhaps some others for the sake of comparison, with language they can understand

-as we repeat the skill, revisiting their perception of it and rephrasing as needed

It should be apparent that repeating verbatim whatever we heard from someone in a workshop without perspective or pursuit of deeper understanding for ourselves is at best a markedly inferior route. WCS is difficult to learn, difficult to do. But I think a lot of us manage to make it even harder! 

Here’s a recent example. I was working with a follower on developing stretch in her anchor. She didn’t really have any goals there other than ‘several teachers said I was bad at it.’

The breakdown went something like this.

 

What are the limiting factors for her with this aspect of her dance?

-She wasn’t completing her weight transfer over her 6

-She often prioritized (subconsciously) pushing with her feet and/or where her feet went, over maintaining her frame. Essentially, releasing her back muscles and backing out beyond the limits of her own frame.

-She sometimes got a little bit back-weighted due to focusing on some aesthetic things.

 

What variables do we have to work with?

-Her awareness of core activation and pelvis positioning came from her belly button. 

-Her free arm tended to be a bit disengaged. This let me know that she was really only using the back muscles on her connecting side.

-Her ability to push with her feet into the floor and create backward energy (stretch/tension/directional intent) just with her feet was exceptionally good. She didn't really use pitch or weight transfers to find this connection.

 

Let’s find out what's efficient for her

-Worked on activating both sides of her upper back for a more solidly engaged frame overall. This helped her become aware of when she was releasing her frame to keep moving backward and helped with free arm aesthetics.

-Trying one common anchor variant: seeking constantly increasing distance and pressure. That is, the intention of stepping back-back-back through her anchoring triple. I didn’t expect this to be the one to go with given her habit of backing out of her frame, but we tried it anyway because her foot pressure made her potentially very good at it.

-Trying another common anchor variant: finding some degree of stretch around the end of 4 and maintaining that until the end of 6; at which point the stretch would increase as she settled her hip. This version was much more natural for her.

-Next, we played with a few different ways of thinking about how her hip would settle in order to finish her weight transfer on 6 and give her leader that feeling of being ‘done’. Thinking about a lateral dropping/pulling in action was the most natural for her.

 

Drilling/reevaluating

-We have the more complete frame engagement, the sensation of stretch that isn’t constantly building, and the lateral hip finish. We did a bunch of basics both with and without music, with the leader she brought with her and with me, using slightly different amounts of connection.

-Of the initial limiting factors I saw, the pitch change was the one that seemed to stick around. This had gone away with the tailbone dominant back-back-back anchoring concept but had returned with the version we chose.

-It turned out that she was doing this to try and find the sensation of stretch when her hips were rotating. As she anchored in third foot position, her front hip relaxed and slouched forward and her connecting side and hand moved back toward her leader. She could tell that the stretch was decreasing and her reflex was to lean back to keep feeling it.

-We worked on a few different cues for keeping intention back with both hips and accompanied that with a sensation she could seek out connecting with her partner as well.

 

I’m sure I could have taught a lot of that better, if not all of it. But the idea is that this is what should be done. We need to walk in with options, with an understanding of the theories adequate to choose the one best suited for the individual at the time, and the ability to explain and rephrase and use examples to best aid with their understanding. We need to be able to show them a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ example, in terms of using the skill effectively, and give them steps to rediscover the skill or technique if they have difficulty recreating it.

 

This can be the norm! And why wouldn't you want it to be. 

Happy New Year, everybody. Let's be good humans with WCS in 2023.