Collisions - Dancing is dangerous?! - it can be a little

One fine chap tells me he scans the dance floor to see where others are dancing ‘tracks’ – up and down a line. Then he ambles over with his partner to dance next to them. I simply find a spot with plenty of room. I will not do much dancing up and down the tracks. I don’t even have that as an aspiration - to be consistently doing that. You take the train, and I will use my car. Besides many freestyle moves are not conducive with tracks. It is limiting. It is also dull. That is my opinion. The one theoretical benefit is that if we were all sticking to those invisible tracks there would be far less collisions. However, this is not line dancing, nor is it formation dancing. It is freestyle. I have seen some do track dancing with aplomb. They looked very good. But, the second time I saw it, it was much less interesting to watch.

The first rule of dancing is that it is always the leaders fault no matter what. It is the job of the leader to make sure their follow is kept safe, kept away from others, from other leaders and from other followers. I can’t recall a teacher ever talk about collisions. I though spent a good while going through it with my temporary partner. She was learning the lead, and this is a key aspect. There are two things to remember. Pull, tug hard. Pull them out of the way quickly and firmly. Don’t be shy about it. You won’t do much mischief when being assertive. A bump or a tread down on your foot will hurt much much more. Pull firmly and early. Pull them when they are within a foot of hitting someone, not an inch. Learn how to keep a bigger buffer, a big spacing and you have a greater margin of error. It will muck up the flow, it will muck up the dance briefly, but it won’t muck up the evening. The injuries I have seen, whilst infrequent, are proper painful. If you are leading and collide, it is usually not your fault, it is the fault of the other leader. Not always, but generally speaking it is. You don’t have eyes in the back of your head. They sent their follower towards you.