There’s nothing wrong with practicing weak spots. Some skills are simply essential for success in a given domain. In WCS, if you can’t do an anchor, you’re going to struggle.

But, if you spend all your time practicing the things you do poorly, you aren’t taking advantage of your strengths. Surprisingly, practice is most effective when it focuses on strong skills and builds them into world-class skills.

The claim that practice is most effective when it focuses on skills that are already strong makes sense when we think in concrete terms. Who is going to get the most out of practicing body rolls—someone who struggles with body isolations or someone who already has a great deal of body control? The person who struggles with isolations may pick up a couple of movements, but the person with body control has the ability to polish those movements into acts that stand out and catch the judges’ eyes. Likewise, a person who has a solid repertoire of footwork variations is going to get more out of practicing funky syncopations than a person who struggles with basic foot positions.

The reality is, practice time is limited. If you want to become exceptional by fixing all of your weaknesses, you’re fighting an uphill battle. If, on the other hand, you minimize your weaknesses and pour your effort into making your strengths truly outstanding, you’ll be able to leverage your existing skills to a far greater degree. Practice to your strengths.

The Drill: Without a partner, you are going to do chaines turns down the floor at an angle. Start with your weight on your right foot. Step down the floor at approximately a 45° angle with your left, then close your right as you spin to your left. Step out with your left again, continuing the angle, but slowly settle into the left as you draw in your right foot. The timing for this movement is 1&2 hold 3, hold 4. Now your right foot is free, so you can repeat the sequence stepping at a 45° angle to the right starting with your right foot and turning to the right.

The focus of this drill should be on filling the space during the 3 and 4 in a controlled and measured way. You can slowly gather your feet, stop the turn slightly under-rotated and let your center finish the rotation slowly during 3, 4, and use your arms and head to continue the movement as you settle through the held counts.

Picture by Lori

To understand why some moves work well no matter who you’re dancing with and some moves seem liable to break, Mario Robau, Jr. divides patterns into three categories.

• Social patterns can be followed by anyone who knows their WCS basics, even if they haven’t seen the specific pattern before. Social patterns work because they keep the same pattern rules, timing, and connection as the fundamental WCS moves. A push break with a tuck, a left side inside roll, and a whip with a single turn are all examples of social patterns.
• Workshop patterns are lead- and follow-able, but only if the dancers have learned the pattern previously. These patterns may syncopate the rhythm of the dance, change the connection, or otherwise break from the fundamental WCS structure. The hip catch, which syncopates the follower’s footwork, and the rock-and-go, which messes with the connection and footwork of the anchor, are examples of workshop patterns.
• Choreographed patterns require both the leader and follower to be on the same page for the move before it even begins. These patterns aren’t “leadable” or “followable” in the traditional sense. If the partners have practiced the move then they may be able to make it look like they are responding to each other, but these moves have no chance of succeeding if both partners aren’t planning the move in advance.

The next time you are out social dancing, pay attention to the kinds of patterns you dance. Specifically:
For leaders:

1. What is the breakdown of your pattern selection? Are you 80 social/20 workshop/0 choreographed, 50/30/20, 20/70/10?
2. Which kinds of patterns result in errors, on either side of the dance?

For followers:

1. Notice the breakdown of patterns in your leaders. Which leaders lead predominantly social patterns? Workshop patterns? Choreographed patterns?
2. Which kinds of patterns result in errors, regardless of who made the error?

If you actually try this exercise, you’ll probably notice that social patterns result in few, if any, mistakes, whereas workshop and choreographed patterns are higher-risk. If you compete, this is important information. If you want to be able to social dance with anyone, this is important information. The bottom line is: learning how to dance within your social patterns—and that includes doing your musicality and styling within those patterns—will enable you to dance much better, much more consistently, no matter who you draw or ask to dance.

Picture by crmgucd

The Drill: With a partner, dance a move with a throwout: a left side slingshot, a whip with an accelerated throwout on 5, or even a push break that quickly sends the follower all the way to the end of the slot on 5. This is going to be the move that you play with throughout this drill.

After dancing this move a couple of times to get the “normal” feel into your body, dance the hard accent version. On this version, the leader should delay an instant longer than normal before sending the follower, and the follower should stay into the connection in order to match what the leader is giving. This slight delays allows both partners to accelerate the sendout part of the move. Both partners should hit a crisp pose and freeze at the end of the sendout.

The hard accent version creates a forceful accent. The partnership moves from slight delay to rapid movement to frozen in quick succession, which makes the sendout look explosive.

Now, switch to the soft version. In this version, both partners should continue some movement even after they reach the end of the slot in order to settle their energy. Whether than be sinking into a knee, dragging to gather a foot, or letting an arm dissipate the energy in a controlled manner is up to you. This version should go: slight delay, definite but not explosive sendout, controlled settle.

Bonus Variations: Experiment with other moves to see where you can make the same movements either hard or soft. Moves that release compression are generally easier (e.g., whips, push breaks, folds); moves that rely on an away connection like side passes can be done but require solid connection skills in order for the partners to feel the difference.

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Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

When we practice, it is tempting to see failure as, well, a failure. But, truly exceptional performers know that failure is an essential part of the learning process. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t improving.

If you want to improve your dancing, you can’t play it safe. You can’t keep doing the same side pass that you’ve always done. Find something in your dance that you are failing at, and do it again. Keep going until you fail at a higher level. For a beginner, you might move from failing to keep the timing of your triples to failing to roll through the feet. That’s a huge improvement. Failing to roll through your feet is failing at a much higher level than the failure to keep time. If you can move to failing at a higher level, your dance will improve substantially.

Keep trying. Keep failing. Fail better.

Picture by Roger Pic

So far, you’ve discovered your play vocabulary and cleaned up your movements so they look good. Now that you can execute your movements consistently, it’s time to fit them to music.

The Drill: For each movement that you’ve developed, do the movement without music. Ask yourself what the movement does. Does it feel like the accent is on the beginning or end of movement? Is it a sharp or sustained accent? Quiet or loud? Fast or slow? Maybe there are different ways to dance the movement to give it different flavors. That’s awesome—go ahead and figure out as many options as you want.

Once you have a sense of what kind of musical accents would fit your movement, put on a song with those sounds. Freestyle dance to that song, putting in that movement as often as appropriate. Your goal is to build the habit of executing your movement when you hear the right kind of sound.

The final step is to put your movements into your WCS. Put on the same song you used earlier and dance basic patterns by yourself. Whenever you have the opportunity to execute the movement within the pattern and it fits the song, do so.

During this step, you will probably find awkward moments in which you can’t complete your pattern on time. When that happens, make a note of what pattern and count you got lost. When you finish the song, turn off your music player and try that pattern with your accent again. You may need to adjust part of your movement in order to stay within the pattern, or you may realize that the movement simply doesn’t fit within that part of that pattern.

Picture by US Farm Security Administration

If you’ve hosted your closed-windows dance party, you should have some movements that have the potential to be good play pieces. How do you polish them so that you’re willing to dance them in front of people?

The Drill: This is a solo drill. Start by picking one or two of the “this has potential” movements that you discovered during your dance party. Find a large mirror that you can practice in front of. As you do the movement, pay attention to what makes the movement look or feel awkward—weird arm angles, being unbalanced after a kick, etc. Do the movement again and try to eliminate that awkward element.

The key to this exercise is your willingness to experiment. It’s easy to see what went wrong; fixing it is much harder. So, when you find something that’s not quite right, be willing to try a bunch of options to fix it. You may have to experiment with a half-dozen elements—where is the leg pointed, how is it rotated, what part of the foot is making contact with the ground, how is your upper body shaped, etc.—before you find something that looks right. That’s ok, and is in fact a normal part of the process. Be willing to try tweaking lots of bits in order to find something that looks good on you.

Once you have found a way to make the move look good, don’t stop there! It’s really important to practice it a number of times doing it right, so that your body can remember how to get there. It would be a shame to do all that work of refining the movement and then not do the repetitions to preserve your work!

Picture by Wen Cheng Liu

The Drill: Make a list of your five favorite pros on the side of the dance you want to work on. Go to YouTube and watch videos of those pros, noting specific things they do that you like. For instance, you might notice an arm on a hip catch, an anchor, or a body shape on a tuck. Be as specific as possible—you should try to find something that takes no more than two beats of music.

Now you should have a list of five pros and a couple of things to watch for. Again, play through a bunch of YouTube videos. This time, watch for every time that one of the items on your list comes up. If you’re looking for hip catch arms, note every time that any of your pros does a hip catch arm.

The reason that you picked five pros initially is so you can have your pros “vote” on what you should do. If three of your pros do an arm that goes down on a hip catch, you should try going down. If all five of your pros typically anchor in an open third, you should adopt an open third.

By repeating this process, you’ll synthesize your own list of style variations from the pros whose dancing you most admire. Odds are that the pros won’t be unanimous on all of your variations, so what you put together will be uniquely yours.

Picture by Ed Schipul

You can get into play and you can return to the normal dance. Now what?

This is the part of the process that is different for everyone. In short, you need to develop your repertoire of movements that fit you and your dance style so that when you want to play, you have a dance vocabulary to draw from. This drill is the first step in discovering the movements that make sense for you.

The Drill: This drill is done without a partner. Actually, it’s done without anyone: get away from the kids, close the door on the pets, and draw the blinds. You may also want to have a glass of wine on hand.

Put on a song that makes you want to dance and freestyle. Whatever comes to mind, do it. This is not the time for self-censorship: if you have an urge to air guitar or booty shake, now’s the time. There’s a reason you closed the blinds earlier.

About 80% of what you do will be awful. If over half of what you’re doing is not bad, you’re not trying enough new things. Again, this is not the time to hold back—dance like a fool.

As you try a thousand different moves, most of which will be awful, you will eventually stumble upon something that’s not half bad. It’s probably not good, but you will feel like that might be cool, someday. Figure out what that movement was and make a note of it. Voice recorder or videocamera apps can be useful, but make sure you’re only recording the good stuff: you don’t want to fear preserving your 80% of awful moves.

By the end of your private dance party, you should have found one or two movements that have potential to become part of your dance. What you will want to do eventually is polish those movements. Congratulations—you have discovered something you can do when you play!

Keep putting on songs from a broad range of genres, and you’ll slowly discover the movements that make up your dance. This will be the vocabulary that you draw from when you play.

Picture by Steven Depolo

This series has gone over a number of ways to add color to your dance. At this point, you know enough about coloring your basics to start exploring new ways of coloring on your own. This post will give you some ideas for new colors to add to your palette.

In general, the key concept for coloring the dance is contrast. If you want to call attention to an element of your dancing, it will stand out more when the parts immediately before and after do the opposite.

Some contrasts that you can play with are:

• Adding or taking away weight changes
• Using big or small arm movements
• Dancing at open distance or closed distance
• Rotating into the arm or away from the arm
• Speeding up or slowing down parts of moves
• Leading moves with two hand connections or one hand connections
• Leading moves with lots of spins or moves that don’t spin

The Drill: With or without a partner, pick a contrast and practice dancing basics with both extremes of the contrast. Determine what that contrast brings out and what kind of musical expression it creates, and practice applying that contrast to appropriate moments in the music.

Picture by painterwoman