Selecting A Dance Instructor
It's a surprisingly opaque market!
It’s kind of annoying to find a good, reliable parter dance instructor. And this is very important if you want to get into partner dance— the most critical parts of the dance for leads involve communication and you can’t really learn that alone. Just doing stuff at socials will tell you what empirically works, but doesn’t tell you why failures occurred or what you ought to have done differently.
You need an expert. Thus: a dance instructor for 1:1 lessons.
Finding Private Instructors
Most of the time dance studios that have group classes will also do private lessons. They don’t typically advertise this fact very well, but I’ve never seen a studio that hosts group classes but doesn’t do private lessons; I think that’s because private lessons are a really high-margin and convenient service compared to group classes, with many virtues for the studio:
Unlike group classes which have varying attendance, private lessons are incredibly easy to predict the per-hour revenue of.
Private lessons can be scheduled ad-hoc around whatever other obligations the instructor has.
Generally the venue is a monthly sunk cost for the business owner, with zero marginal cost of usage so it’s basically all profit.
So: check around on the website to see if private lessons are mentioned, and if they’re not, I suggest just emailing the studio’s contact email to check explicitly. Sometimes they won’t get back to you because they’re disorganized.
Asking in-person about private lessons is frequently really good ROI on effort. Even if the person you ask says no, they’ll almost certainly know someone who is selling private lessons.
Which brings me to:
I think dance people might be a bit disorganized as a class
I suspect the kind of person who becomes a dance instructor is frequently the artistic type who’s a little bit disorganized. At a west coast swing event I found a sheet with the names and contact info of about ten different dance instructors. I sent emails off to six of them. Exactly one of those people gave me any kind of response. Many of the others linked to Facebook profiles that required friending before you sent a message.
One of the non-responders I spoke to later was happy to arrange privates; she suggested I contact her on Facebook, I told her that her profile was private, and she seemed a bit surprised and was like “Huh. Okay, guess I’ll friend you.”
I suspect most dance instructors spend very little time on optimizing their sales funnel.
Cost and Quality
There Is Very Little Price Transparency In This Industry
For unclear reasons, almost no instructors I’ve found in the Minneapolis-St Paul area are willing to tell you their prices on their public-facing website. You have to get them in person or over IM and ask directly. Makes it annoying to comparison shop. I suspect this generalizes to elsewhere.
Boo.
Ballrooms Are Easy To Find But A Dicey Value Proposition
[epistemic status: n=1, heard from others also]
Ballrooms tend to be organized a bit better than instructor-run studios. This isn’t universally true— Minneapolis Salsa Bachata Dance is quite efficiently run— but part of what you’re getting in a ballroom is a whole-ass support staff. As a consequence, ballrooms are both easier and quite a lot more expensive to procure private lessons from than instructor-run studios, because you’re not just paying the instructors’ salary, you’re also paying the support staff.
There Is Little Relationship Between Price And Quality
I found Minneapolis Salsa-Bachata Dance to be both the cheapest private salsa lessons I’ve ever found, and also the highest-quality.
As a consequence of both this personal experience and the general observed lack of price transparency in the industry, I strongly suspect that there’s not much of a relationship between how much you’re spending on private instructors and the quality of the instruction you receive. Higher prices probably correlate with the following aspects:
Whether or not you’re dealing directly with an instructor (lower cost) vs dealing with a larger business who employs an instructor (higher cost).
Whether your instructor is famous/well-known.
Note that neither of these are particularly related to quality. And the industry’s price-opacity combined with the lack of a universal rating system for dance instructors means it’s not really obvious how the market should make price track quality.
Market logic can’t save you here; you’ll have to do your own investigation.
Also, Good Is A Multifaceted Concept
Instructors are good at different things.
I have one instructor (the highly skilled yet anomalously cheap one I mentioned) who runs her studio like a stereotypical martial arts studio. She wants technical perfection from her students and is entirely willing to devote twenty minutes to drilling the same eight-step pattern with me until I finally get it precisely right. When we do warm-up dances we only rarely get all the way through them because she will almost certainly kill the song halfway through and say “AARON WE NEED TO WORK ON YOUR [follow-shaping/footwork/basic step/turns/cross-body leads/etc]”
(I burned out on sensual bachata for like two months because we had spent something like eight consecutive instruction-hours working on body rolls and I just couldn’t take it anymore.)
This is actually really useful in many regards but there’s a different instructor who I use when I want to get the broad strokes of a skill + learn to integrate it with a dance without having to spend tons of sessions just to get to the “integrate with a dance” part.
It’s beneficial, I think, to sample a lot of different instructors.
Gender Is An Acceptable Proxy For Following Experience
[epistemic status: n=small, take with a grain of salt]
I think it’s best to find a female instructor, if you’re learning to lead.
That’s for a simple reason: 95% of the time, a male is going to have more experience leading and a female will have more experience following; “gender” here is just a proxy for “relative experience leading rather than following”, since you can’t see “number of hours spent following” as a glowing number floating Death-Note-style above someone’s head.
And if you’re a lead you want a really experienced follow because they know exactly how a lead from you is supposed to feel. Due to a scheduling mishap at one point I got a male instructor trying to teach me to lead, and while I wouldn’t call it disastrous he clearly was a lot slower at following than most female dancers. That fact meant that he could give good footwork suggestions (since footwork can be discussed in a solo context, and he obviously knows the lead footwork cold) but he couldn’t give particularly granular guidance on connection and in partner dance connection is the hard part.
Vibes Are Extremely Important
You’re going to spend countless hours with this person so make sure it’s someone you like spending time with.
That Means Finding A Good Instructor Needs Experimentation
There’s no “Yelp, but for instructors.” The only way to figure out who good instructors are is to make first appointments with a few of them and just notice things that they seem to do differently. If you can, hit up socials and check to see if stuff you learned from one instructor actually transfers to random followers that don’t know you.
Red Flags
Backleading
In partner dancing, one person leads by giving physical signals—through frame, hand pressure, body positioning—and the follow responds to those signals. Backleading unintentionally disrupts this dynamic, and this can manifest in a couple ways:
Anticipating: The follower starts a move before the lead is given.
Resisting or redirecting: The follower physically steers themselves (or the leader) toward a different move than what was led.
This is an incredibly common bad habit among instructors. My typical (very good) instructor doesn’t do it except in extremely specific scenarios she tells me about in advance; in particular, when I’m literally trying to execute a move for the first time, backleading can be helpful to understand the gross motor movements involved.
If you suspect your instructor is backleading but you’re not sure, you can just tell her “I’m going to mix that move up with another move with similar preparation to make sure I’m doing it right” and if you suddenly notice that your success rate takes a nosedive, then you are being backled. That’s terrible for learning as a lead because it means you’re not actually leading the move, you’re just pantomiming the lead, which means when you get out on a real dance floor you will achieve a very poor success rate in leading whatever move it was because you never actually learned to lead it.
(Not-anticipating is a very difficult skill to learn as a follow; they aren’t doing this out of malice, it’s just really hard to force your brain to not anticipate movements that you absolutely know are coming.)
I Am Suspicious Of Pattern-Focused Instructors
Patterns— memorized chains of moves meant to go together— are a common organizing principle for group classes because group classes require everyone to learn the same set of moves for logistical reasons.
Private 1:1 lessons aren’t this. I suspect that if an instructor is leaning heavily on teaching you patterns in 1:1 private lessons, this can be indicative of holes in their skill lineup.
Besides: patterns are useful as a source of modular moves, but if that’s mostly what you’re getting in a private lesson, you’re paying 1:1 rates for something a group class could give you.
What To Do During A Lesson
The Default Option
You can just let your instructor decide what to teach you in a given lesson. This works, and probably is a good play if you’re just starting in a dance style.
If you’ve been dancing in a style for a little while, though, I find the following angles very useful:
Move Expansion
Patterns— that is, chains of moves you know how to do together— are composed of several modular pieces. It is frequently the case that I’ll know a pattern and feel as though after I start it, that I’m just on-rails and want other stuff I can execute from the middle of the pattern instead of just doing the one sequence.
It’s totally legitimate and useful to ask your instructor: “what different stuff can I do, when I’m in a hammerlock?” Or “what kinds of moves can I do after executing a hand toss?”
Dance is a finite state machine. Any given state— hammerlock, closed position, open position, crossed-hands position— has a whole bunch of different moves you can do from it, and if you start to get bored a really useful thing to do is to look at a specific position and ask your instructor “what else can I do when I’m here, that I haven’t been doing previously?”
They’ll have some opinions and they frequently enjoy answering this kind of question.
Debugging
One of the best uses of 1:1s is in asking “I think this move should work but, in practice, it isn’t. What am I doing wrong?”
Conclusion
Go to dance studios for initial contacts. Notice and, if it happens, deal with your instructor backleading you. For cost-effectiveness reasons, probably go to an independent studio instead of a ballroom. But the most important thing (yes, I know it’s cliche) is to have fun. Willpower is a weak muscle, and the most important thing for long-term skill growth is that you look forward to practicing.
Godspeed.