Our Style of Dancing
​Why?
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Social Freestyle Partner Dancing
It's spontaneous, fun & practical for dancing in the real world
You can dance with anyone, on any dance floor to any music.
Social Dancing
The goal is to be able to
dance for fun in social situations
NOT dance competitively as a sport.
Social dancing is all about the music. Dances emerge to suit the popular music & rhythms of a particular time period and culture. As popular music & rhythms have changed, new dances have evolved to suit them.
Social dancing requires different skills to competition dancing
Steps have to suit everyday people, be easy to use & adaptable to different music, social events & small or crowded dance floors.
Freestyle Dancing
This means no sequences, routines or specific songs
Freestyle dancing is about partnership & not performance
It's about learning good leading & following skills & having a repertoire of comfortable, practical & versatile steps that you like & can have fun with.
Freestyle dancing is an
Art & Not a Science
There is no standard set of step patterns for any particular dance & no limit to creativity in developing new steps.... & wouldn't it be boring if there was?
Each dance studio tends to have their own syllabus of steps.
While the fundamentals are the same, variations are common.
The steps a studio chooses to teach in any given dance may be modified for practical or creative reasons.
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The DanceFix Syllabus has been developed & refined over the last 25 years of working & training with studios & instructors around Australia & internationally.
We think its the best (of course) :)
Partner Dancing
Freestyle Partner Dancing has a leader & a follower.
The leader learns to use different hand & body movements as signals to 'lead' different steps while the follower learns to recognize these signals & 'follow' the movements.
This is called Partnership
Real world social dancing requires you to be able to navigate different sized & often crowded dancefloors. This is called Floorcraft
Social Freestyle needs just enough technique & styling to get people dancing together comfortably & looking good. Ideally we also want each dance to have a distinct look or "personality".
This doesn't require the same level of precision & flamboyance necessary for competition or performance style dancing. So you can be much more relaxed.
Of course, that doesn't mean you can't master these elements & show off if you want too!!
FYI ...Other Styles of Partner Dancing
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International Style Dancing
>> focuses on dancing as a competitive sport. International style focuses on professional performance and technical skills most often presented through standardized steps and choreographed routines. The emphasis is on precision and presentation of certain techniques and movements. This is highly structured form of dancing.
Performance Dancing
>> tends to consist of choreographed routines performed to particular pieces of music. This type of dancing tends to form the focus of what you would see on tv (e.g. Dancesport, Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance). Performance dancing always looks fantastic (when the professionals do it) because it is so precise, but it is not a practical style for social dancing situations where there are crowded and/or small dance floors, lots of different music and different people to dance with.
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Sequence Dancing
>> tends to consist of a sequence of steps in a particular order, repeated over and over again.
Progressive Dancing
>> tends to consist of a sequence of steps incorporating a change of partners (e.g. New Vogue or Casino Rueda)