Waltz, Tango, Foxtrot, Rumba, ChaCha, Salsa, Mambo, Samba, Swing ... the list was pretty long. It scared the shit out of me the first time I entered the studio. Not to mention the whole 'partner' thing. By the time I entered the studio for my first lesson, I was sure that I was going to make a complete ass of myself. But at the same time I was also excited to take on a completely new challenge.
During my first ever ballroom lesson, I learned the box step. This is the most basic step in several dances, and the foundation of even the most advanced dancers' skill set. There is a stereotype that ballroom dancing is an art - not something meant for nerds, engineers, scientists, techies, and businesspeople. But I walked out of that lesson with a completely different view. A rotating box with perfect angles in multiples of 15 that has to move around the room? I could grok that. Stretching the rotating box into a rotating parallelogram to move the center of gravity of a couple in a straight line? Now things were getting interesting. I could be an academic about this.
Dancing didn't have to be an abstract artform that characterized by statements like "I dance what I feel" or "I'm expressing my inner self". I learned that there are many books written about dancing, video tutorials, etc, that break down every move and tell you how to do it - exactly where to place your foot, whether to use the ball or the heel, whether to step and turn or turn before you step, whether to have your weight on a single foot or evenly divided, whether to have forward or backward poise.
This is not to say that there is no art in dancing - any scientist will tell you that there is beauty in science, any engineer will tell you that there is art in engineering. In the coming days I hope to explore the scientific artform that is ballroom dance with you.
