Basic Elements of Swing Dancing | Swing Dance

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The best way to learn any dance is to practice the elements that make up that dance, much like practicing your scales on a piano. If you learn to read music and you learn your scales, you can play any song put in front of you. Same type of thing when it comes to the different styles of swing. If you understand some basic swing elements you can put them together a lot like Legos to make up the different style of swing. Some of those elements are walking, touch-stepping, triple stepping, and kick-ball-changes. Let's just do that in place.

Just walk in place. Doesn't matter what foot you start with, just walk. Feel what that walking rhythm feels like. Now we want to make sure we're over our feet, not back here marching behind our feet, right? We're dancing over our feet, right? So there's walking.

Then there's touch-stepping. Touch, step, touch, step. When get comfortable touch-stepping don't just do it underneath you. Touch to the side, touch forward and back. Get comfortable just moving around.

And then of course we have our triple steps as well. Triple step underneath you, right? Triple step going sideways. I would even triple step going forward and back. Right? Just getting comfortable with what that rhythm feels like.

Then we have our kick-ball-change. Kick, ball (it's the ball of the foot), change. From the side that goes kick, ball change, kick, ball change. You can even do it with both feet. Kick, ball change, kick, ball change. Again, kick, ball change, kick, ball change.

If you don't pick the foot up it's touch-ball-change. Touch, ball change, touch, ball change, as opposed to a kick-ball-change. Some movement, just looks a little bit different because I'm not picking the foot up. So we're going to go ahead and take those elements and put them to music. You want to practice them a lot so that you can draw upon them as necessary when you're doing the different varieties of swing. We're going to do it to music right now.

There you have all of your elements that make up swing dancing.