The Nature of Dance

If you're male (or want to dance as a leader), there are universally not enough of you to go around in partner dancing (with occasional exceptions), so any partner dance you pick you should be well received if you aren't a creep and just do the work to improve. Some of these dances are easier to get into than others. So your area might have salsa classes. Salsa is nice because it's easy to get into, but you can keep getting better at it forever. Bachata is similar but it's a bit more intimate in my view, so depends what you're after.

Some places just have "social dancing" classes, which is a different thing each week, but they might require you bring a partner, so look into it.

If you're from the US, or less commonly outside of the US, line dancing is a non-partner dance, so a group dance. One of my best friends does it and he loves it. Again don't need to be good to start.

Would 100% recommend any kind of partner dancing. my personal favorite is salsa. Granted I love the music, but there is so much to learn in salsa you will never get bored. The connection to music and your partner whilst dancing is some of the best feeling i have ever had. and its a great way to socialise and meet new people.

Just go to any beginner class for social dancing (salsa, bachata, etc etc). They'll have had older/less co-ordinated, trust me. It's fantastic physical, mental exercise and a great way to meet people/be part of a community. I don't regret any of the time I spent dancing.

The writer appears to touch one important point. Many of us are mind-oriented, have lost touch with our emotional and physical side. For us, body is just for moving brain around.

While we all have all of the sides, for such a person, other sides are atrophied from under-utilization, while mind is hyper-trophied from overuse for for things it is not so good at. The primary obstacle for a person like that is to start developing the atrophied sides.

If this is the case, the best way to start is with the simplest possible partner dance, because mind-oriented people naturally approach learning complex body movements through mind, which is exactly the opposite you need to be doing.

So something where steps are one step per beat, like Swedish bugg.

if you avoid the ideological capture of "getting good at [dance style]" then what you dance means is "playing with the physical energy stored in the body"

muscles store physical energy in the form of tension, if you can create a bit of tension [here] then smoothly transfer it [there] you are "dancing".

how it looks to an observer is irrelevant. stretch this game enough on every dimension and it will eventually start to look [positive valence] to observers

Dancing in large groups with other humans truly is primal, and something special. It's akin to the experience I think people get when going to church and similar things, weirdly enough.

Everything is so artificial online today as well, that maybe it's the contrast between what we see all day vs when we're at events, that make it all seem extra special nowadays.

Once again, I’m not at all surprised that tech people can’t simply enjoy the activity for its own sake, but instead impose their calculating, utility-driven mindset on something that is truly beautiful and brings people together. An absolutely bleak perspective.

Several, but as the other comment pointed out, Urban Kiz is my main focus, as well as Tarraxo and Zouk.

Looks like he's into Urban Kiz (I suspect a kind of Kizomba, which is quite popular in Europe).

Note: the author is also on HN. He made this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649789

"Dance clip" seems to do exactly 0 things I can't already do with the video editor/folder system on my phone.

I agree, and actually I put that asterisk there all that time ago when I wrote that article intending to put a footnote at the end, and clearly forgot. I meant to say that yes certainly people don't learn in the same way, but the thing I'm averse to is someone saying "I learn by seeing", and leaving it at that. It's simplistic, and I've found that individuals can also be wrong about their own opinion if their learning style.

The way I read some of the literature is that these may more often map to preferences, so the individual may prefer to see things, when learning, but it might not actually lead to more learning happening.

In dance I would yield that some people can repeat a movement just by seeing it, and others can't, but again I would say that's a learning style, I'd say there's a capacity inside them that is less strong/developed, translating movement seen to movement done. And it can be improved.

In my day job I am an instructor. It has become fashionable of late to shit on the idea of learning styles for various reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Criticism

Means != styles.

https://onlineteaching.umich.edu/articles/the-myth-of-learni...

> bullshit detection

This doesn't sound like anything that's not accepted by mainstream medicine to me. If they'd started bringing pseudoscientific ideas in then sure, but breathing exercises are a well-known way to regulate your nervous system aren't they?