About the Author of Partnership Dancing SM
Balance is the most important skill in dancing. People teach steps. Steps are easy to teach. Balance is hard to teach. ~ Andres, tango dancer
Klezmer dancing at the Florida Folk Festival
That is me Andrew Weitzen in the red shirt in the upper left of the website.
I invented Partnership Dancing to teach Israeli folk dancers how to dance with a partner.
Partnership Dancing turned out to be so effective that it works for every social dance that we know.
With Partnership Dancing you can unambiguously communicate every step in every social dance
in the same way with every partner.
There are big advantages for communicating precisely: safer, more comfortable,
more natural dancing, more freedom of expression, consistent teaching, faster learning,
better social environment and happier groups.
I have no special qualifications.
I am not a performer or a professional dancer.
I am a regular guy that likes to dance, just like most of you.
A startlingly simple method for communicating all the steps
I was trying to solve a problem that was bothering me.
In Israeli folk dancing, the partner dances are choreographed.
The women memorize their part.
The men memorize their part.
Then they get together and wrestle with one another to see who is right or who has the strongest will.
That is a joke, but not far from the truth and it causes a lot of problems.
These problems happen in one way or another in all social dances.
When I moved back to my home town, I started organizing Israeli folk dancing and swing dancing groups.
I had been doing a lot of other kinds of dancing, like ballroom, cajun,
contra, country western, salsa, tango, waltz, zydeco and other social dances.
I felt there was too much emphasis on choreography and I wanted to focus on communication.
In my Israeli partner dancing group, rather than have the women memorize their parts,
I decided to teach the folk dancers how to dance together like in swing dancing where the men lead and the women follow.
Partnership Dancing
works for every social dance
Israeli partner dancing incorporates dances from all over the world, including American, Arabic, Balkan,
Brazilian, cha cha, Latin, hambo, mazurka, polka, samba, salsa, swing, Russian, tango, waltz, Yemenite and much more.
Since Israeli dances are choreographed by professionals and since people are expected to memorize the dances,
the choreography is often more complex than most people normally do in any of those other dances done as lead and follow.
Experienced Israeli dancers know hundreds of Israeli partner dances, which is a lot of choreography.
Any method to teach Israeli partner dancers how to dance with a partner,
should work with many other dances and with a wide variety of choreography.
In trying to organize the hundreds of pointers I had gotten from the many social dance classes I had taken
I found that what people were doing in lead and follow dances was inadequate as a means of communicating unambiguously.
In ballroom, salsa, swing, tango and the other dances, a lot of the following relied on getting used
to a regular partner and memorizing the choreography.
Worse, there was a lot of pushing and pulling your partner about.
It is better with a partner. You need someone to take your picture.
and incorporate them into a system for Israeli dancers to use,
Instead, I came up with a startlingly simple method for communicating all the steps.
I call this system Partnership Dancing
SM.
Partnership Dancing works so well, that women can follow every Israeli partner dance without learning the choreography
and do the dances better than the women who memorize the steps, because those following are dancing each step with their partner,
instead of only next to their partner.
Amazingly Partnership Dancing works for every social dance that we have tried and we have tried a lot.
Partnership Dancing will transform how you dance with a partner, helping you to dance safely, dance naturally,
express yourself more freely, teach consistently, learn faster,
and feel more comfortable, confident and popular.
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Partnership Dancing SM
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