Partner dancing

Anyone can lead or follow! - My Story

Partner dancing is a wonderful experience and it tends to be an addictive one as well. You always start off by learning one dance and making one group of friends, then some of them maybe dance more than one dance and they take you to a second party and then a third and within the span of less than a decade you have finished all possible partner dance styles. That is my story at least. After many many years of dancing and partner dancing (I started with ballet when I was six years old, though that wasn't necessarily nearly as fun) I had tried it all: salsa (every shade of it), bachata, kizomba, zouk, afrobeats, forrò, tango, milonga, canyengue, ballroom and latin, acrobatic, swing... I was desperate, because no matter how many dances I learnt I always felt like I was missing something, like my dancing wasn't complete.

One day, at a swing party (they are generally considered to be the hippies of partner dancing in my scene) I saw something that changed my worldview: the instructor told the ladies to lead the men for the rest of the class. After that I started noticing that he didn't call them ladies, instead he called them followers, and the men were being addressed as leads. It may seem like an insignificant semantic detail but it dawned on me that it could mean so much. If anyone can lead and anyone can follow, shouldn't a "complete dancer" know how to do both? I started talking to people, to my friends, to their friends, it seemed like mine was a widespread experience. Finally I met some "crossover" leads and follows, that is (in the traditional sense) men that follow and women that lead. All of them reported having similar experiences, eye-opening ones, from their learning jouneys. Thay could understand their partner better, because they knew what they were feeling, they could feel their dances in a way they never could before and - most of all - not one of them reported the task being unnatural or impossible and everyone was enjoying it to the point of being addicted to it like it was a new dance.

I had found my path: I started off "easy" with Cuban Salsa, it had been my first partner dance so I knew all the moves inside and out. It took a few months but in no time I was leading with the men. I got called a tigre (a tigress) for wanting to dance with them but, after a while, they were happy to have me join. I was like the jolly of the situation: are we missing a follow? Carlotta can do it! Is it a lead? Carlotta can still do it! Amazing! After that the other dances followed: swing, then bachata, then tango. Now all that remains for me is to encourage more dancers to do the same. Try to live the life of the other side, be it even just for a month, it is worth it! Let's remove the remaining stigma together!