Ballroom Dancing Book – Wedding Dance Survival Guide – How to Dance
Read the guerrilla manual for surviving on the dance floor – "Every Man's Survival Guide to Ballroom Dancing: Ace Your Wedding Dance and Keep Cool on a Cruise, at a Formal, and in Dance Classes." Learn ballroom dance, formal dance, slow dance, survival dance, how to hear the beat in music, ballroom music phrasing like 32-beat music. Prepare for dance lessons. Intro to foxtrot, swing, salsa, rumba, tango, waltz. Free dance instruction video clips.
In this video Skippy Blair counts the sets of 8 in a piece of music. The hand motion she uses is a good exercise for working on timing and training your body to hear the sets of 8.
Listen for the heavy measure, beats 1 to 4, and the light measure, beats 5 to 8. The light measure is the thematic “conclusion” to a set of 8. Listening for the thematic conclusion is a good way to identify a set of 8.
From Skippy Blair’s 2006 Summer Intensive, video courtesy of Skippy Blair
