Best Ballroom Dance?

Question

What would you consider to be the most enjoyable of the ballroom dances? If I were to go from taking group lessons to investing in private lessons, which dance should I focus on first?

Answer 1

I would say one of the latin dances, namely the salsa or the samba. They are both high energy and tons of fun. If you'd prefer something easier and a litter slower I'd suggest the rumba or the waltz. I'd recommend watching some videos beforehand on one of the popular ballroom dance websites.

I hope that helps you make your decision. I don't think you'll regret it. There are numurous benefits to dancing.

Answer 2

1. For ballroom dancing you need lessons and practice. Not many people (not only teemagers) are ready, eager or willing to do this. 2. For ballroom dancing you need a special, large place (not crowded clubs) and these are not very common or that easy to find. 3. When dancing most people want to have fun and feel good regardless of how they look when they dance, their position or style. In conclusion, ballroom dancing is not so at hand to do... And don't get me wrong ... I absolutely love ballroom dancing !

Answer 3

Start with rhumba or salsa, but the king of ballroom dance is tango. There is a lot to learn there, so it's not for beginners. It can be almost as intricate and demanding as a ballet pas de deux.

Answer 4

I like waltz and foxtrot because they're slow enough that I can focus on improving my technique rather than keeping up with the music.

You should focus on whatever dance you enjoy the most. If you're already doing group classes, you know which dance you like. Do that. Your teacher will be able to give you the technique you typically don't get in group classes which will make your dancing even better (and more fun for you and your partner).

Answer 5

Depends what you want:

Waltz for romance
Swing / Foxtrot for fun
Tango for passion
Rumba / Bolero for sex appeal
Cha Cha / Samba for exercise (and fun)

Answer 6

Go for the Cha Cha! It's a lot of fun and great exercise.

Answer 7

Depends on what you want to do with the dance. All the dances have their positives and negatives. Some dances are big on the competition circuit and some aren't. Some dances are fairly basic and translate well to clubs and social dancing, whereas others require a high level of stamina and/or skill and so it may be tough to find social venues where you can dance them regularly and/or partners that can keep up with you. Some dances are big in one locality but rarely danced in other places.

If you talk with your instructor, he/she can steer you toward a dance that best matches your requirements and the local dance scene.

Of the fast dances, Mambo/Salsa is energetic and fun. (Mambo and Salsa are basically the same dance, with stylistic variations. Mambo is the ballroom variant, Salsa is the club variant.) Mambo fades in and out of popularity on the ballroom circuit, but Salsa is a perennial in the clubs so you can always dance it there. And Mambo is basically just a speeded-up Cha-cha, so you can easily progress from the Mambo to the Cha-cha (or vice versa).

Swing is also a fast dance that's energetic and fun. It's always popular, and it's accessible to beginners. It has lots of popular variations (Jive, Jitterbug, Lindy, East Coast Swing, West Coast Swing, Shag, Zydeco, and so on), so you can spend your whole life just playing around with different versions of Swing. (Tango is similar in that it has lots of variations and can be explored over a lifetime; but it falls in and out of fashion and it may be hard to locate clubs and partners for it at times.)

Ballroom dance purists seem to want to treat all Swings as triple steps (Quick-Quick-Slow, Quick-Quick-Slow, Rock-Step), speeding up the pace or slowing it down depending on whether the song is a Jive or Jitterbug or whatever. But a triple step can be exhausting when the pace is fast, so social dancers often do a single-step variant (Slow, Slow, Rock-Step, where the Slow lasts the same amount of time as the Quick-Quick-Slow of the triple step) for faster Swing tunes. That way you can do a Triple Swing for the slow songs and a Single Swing for the fast songs. Much easier for us old-timers.
:-)

Of the slower dances, Rumba is a perennial favorite among the Latin dances. It's sexy and versatile and accessible to beginners, and it's a good foundation dance for Latin dances. It's so basic in form that you can learn lots of Latin steps in the slow Rumba and then progress from there to the faster Latin dances.

Waltz is a good versatile foundation dance, and it teaches great basic movement skills. In the ballroom you tend to dance it at two different speeds with two very different steps: slow (Slow Waltz) and ultra-fast (Viennese Waltz at the speed of a Strauss Waltz). In social dancing you tend to dance it at a medium-fast pace (you use Viennese Waltz steps, but they are more relaxed and flowing). So that give you three dances in one, and an opportunity to play around with speeds and styles.

I also want to put in a good word for the Foxtrot. Foxtrot often gets overlooked because it's often the very first step that dancers learn. It's very simple at the basic level--it's the dance that you use when you want to slowly shuffle around a postage-stamp sized dance floor with a partner in a hotel lounge or bar. People think of it as being too simple to be much fun. But at the intermediate level, once you start using the bridge step, it becomes fast and fun and intricate. It comes in three speeds: slow (Ballad or Sway), medium (Foxtrot), and fast (Quickstep), so it's another 3-in-1 dance. Like the Rumba, it's so basic in form that it has great versatility. You can dance it in four steps (Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick) or three steps (Slow, Quick, Quick), and as a result you can borrow just about any non-Latin dance step for use in Foxtrot. So it's a great foundation dance for learning a lot of steps and then progressing easily into just about any of the non-Latin dances. It converts directly and easily to Country 2-step for dancing in country bars, and it uses a 4/4 beat (which is the most popular beat in music) so that it can be danced to just about any kind of music at all. The pace is mellow and flowing so you can dance it all night without getting tired, and you can even teach a partner new steps on the run while you're dancing. So it's a great little basic step for universal application in social dance and Ballroom dance at all different skill levels. In a way, I might even consider Foxtrot the “best ballroom dance” just in terms of total overall danceability. Give me a good partner, an empty dance floor, and a 4/4 beat all night (even disco or rock 'n roll music), and I'll probably end up doing Foxtrot most of the night. There are so many ways to dance Foxtrot that it never gets old.

Answer 8

Anything Latin plus the Waltz

Answer 9

I would guess the latin dances would be good to concentrate on first.

Answer 10

tango