Question for all you dancers that attend clubs

[vanillathunder]

hey i was wondering, what kind of dances do the guys do at clubs? i have never been to one, but i want to go, but my friends do not want to go with me. so i may go one day, but just out of curiousity, because i want to learn the dances that the guys do at the clubs. can anybody help me out here? thanx....

[Sagitta]

A very broad question vanillathunder!! There are different types of clubs, and clubs sometimes have different nights. For instance, Commonground in Ithaca had Latin nights on Tuesday, 80s night on Friday, and club dance night on Saturday. Then a club might bring in a raggae group, punk/ska, heavy metal...So what if I was you I would see what kinds of music you like, do some research in your area to see which clubs play that music, (You can even call them up!!), and then look into learning to dance to that!

[pygmalion]

Unless clubs specify dances as Sagitta mentions, I usually go prepared to do some club freestyle dancing -- which is basically whatever you want to the music.


Hmm. That reminds me -- I think there's a thread around here that describes how to develop club freestyle dancing. I wonder where it is? Hmm. I'll try to find it, if I can.

Other than that, club dancing covers everything. You name it. In country and western clubs, you may do two-step, waltz, nightclub two step, rumba, swing ...
In Latin clubs, you may do salsa, meregue, cha cha, bachata ....

And so on.

What kind of music do you like ?

[Sagitta]

I remember starting a thread on freestyle dancing. Click on link below:

Freestyle dancing!! (http://www.dance-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=1669&highlight=freestyle)

Another useful thread is the one on shines in salsa (http://www.dance-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=1158&highlight=shines). Salsa shines are the cool things dancers do when they break apart and do some solo dancing. You can incorporate these into freestyle dancing, plus the advice given here can be applied to any freestyle dancing.

Now I like to talk about myself, so yesterday night I did freestyle dancing from ten onwards!! It was advertised as "club dancing", but actually turned out to be "80s disco night". So, with this fresh in my mind I can definitely say that above two threads are useful. The best part of the dancing was mixing up partnered and solo dancing!! I put in zydeco, merengue, bachata, salsa, cumbia, cha cha, swing...into my freestyle dancing, and so ultimately almost anything you learn about moving to music will help in freestyle dancing. Now this does not really apply to clubs where there have partnered dancing, such as latin/swing/zydeco/ballroom dancing....

[KevinL]

I don't go to clubs often because Vermont still allows smoking in public places and I can't stand that. However Saturday night a bunch of my friends went out salsa dancing after the USABDA dance, so I tagged along as well.

I really suck at salsa, I only know how to do 4-5 basic patterns and that get's boring really fast, especially since the songs are often much longer than I'm used to dancing. However, I do dance well, and so I spent most of the evening making stuff up. It was fun as I've never been very good at "club freestyle" dancing.

I did what I know of salsa, mixed in merengue (that works for everything), and tried to change my rumba and cha cha patterns into salsa. Based on what I've read about some other dance scenes on DF I doubt that the "good" salsa dancers in other scenes would have danced with me, but the people who did had fun, so it's all good.

Other places where I dance I normally would have included some swing, but that just doesn't feel right with latin rhythms.