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I make a distinction between what I call mutual pattern recognition dancing and connection based dancing. The thing that separates them is the amount of time between communications. For example, if I am dancing East Coast Swing, a basic takes six beats of music. When a move is led a signal is usually sent through the arms and hands. When the signal is received and properly decoded the other person executes their part of the pattern for the next six beats. It's fun, easy to teach and learn, and this style of dancing get's people moving on the floor to music quite quickly. I'm all for it, dance a lot of it and will continue to dance it for a long time.
Connection based dancing has a similar send, recieve, decode and execute cycle (jeez, can you tell I studied engineering ?). However, this cycle happens in a much shorter amount of time. In some LIndy Hop moves and the style of Argentine Tango I like to dance, the cycle gets reduced to one to two beat of music. When communicating with your partner every beat, it quicly becomes necessary that you establish a continuous connection. The information about the next step for the follow to take is being communicated every other beat. In the beat where they are not receiving information about what to do, they are doing it. This type of constant interaction leads to a very rich somatic dialog. It is a very fun way to dance and opens the door to musical improvisation.
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