Swingin' The Blues - The Art of Slow Dancing

Careful. Not Swingin’ and not truly Bluesy either. But, well intended…

It’s the sort of “dance school” DVD that comes about when students ask for a class on another style, but “hopefully” using a lot of moves that they already know; “So, how I do this, like that?”

As the Steven’s sisters explain in their introduction, this DVD is about translating your ballroom dance experience into slower dancing to slower music. For what it is, it’s well filmed and well scripted, but it’s a curated set of ballroom (think Waltz, Tango) and Swing moves that look decent when done slowly, presented here as “SLOW dancing.”

And, that wouldn’t be too bad if the pace of events were a little faster, and, you could easily skip past things to focus on what you wanted to work on. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to select just one thing on the menus and wound up fast-forwarding through entire sections on the three DVD players and two computers I tried it on.

Again, this can be a handy instructional DVD if you know two or three dozen ballroom moves already and would like to see her “take” on “slow dancing” that uses moves you already know. And/or, if you’re a decent advanced Swing dancer and want to see how to use the moves you already know without “the bounce.” It’s a way of using things…

If you want to learn Blues from “scratch” and want to skip the clear ballroom bias here, try Daniel and Gaby’s Blues DVDs* at Danceflix. They present a STYLE of Blues that can stand better on it’s own than this collection of curated moves, and they spend more time teaching you HOW to move, and why, than you’ll get on this disk.


* Blues Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 by Daniel Newsome and Gabriella Cook