My Wedding Dance Experience
For most of the soon-to-be-married, the wedding dance is more of an afterthought, the thing you hurriedly invest in after everything else has been taken care of. The pressure of learning a routine in the midst of wedding preparations can be taxing, to say the least. But it can also play an important role in bringing you closer together, as I discovered.
Why am I writing about my own wedding dance experience? Perhaps I’m hoping you’ll learn a bit from my experience, so you don’t make the same mistakes I did. Maybe I just want to give you a clearer picture of the process, so you know what you’re in for. Either way, here we go.
Initially, I recall us half-jokingly talking about just holding each other and doing the high-school shuffle as our dance. I wasn’t even sure I actually wanted to put together an actual routine – wedding dances are stressful enough without the added pressure of being an instructor.
In the end, our perception of what others would expect decided us. (Isn’t it crazy how much of wedding planning can be about meeting other people’s expectations? Who are we doing this for, after all?) We found a nearby event hall willing to rent it’s space out cheaply, and got to work.
Almost immediately, we ran into problems. Although we both liked a lot of the same music, we had very different ideas about how we wanted to move to it. Again, being a dance instructor proved to be more burden than help, as I had to repeatedly shoulder aside my ego in order to make something we both could be satisfied with.
You know you are taking a dance too seriously when you start arguing with your bride-to-be about whether the next step should be a lift or a back spot turn.
Gradually, I learned to listen to my partner, to see the choreography through her eyes. For her part, she did a wonderful job of listening from the start, though she didn’t always agree. And slowly, painfully, a routine began to appear.
I want to stress again, looking back, how foolish I behaved – racking my brains to find some amazing moves “worthy” of our dance experience. I truly believe I might almost have enjoyed the whole process, if I had worried less about the judgement of others.
On the day of the wedding, we had to contend with a sticky dance floor, as the best man forgot to bring the baby powder we had planned to dust it with. But we comforted ourselves with the knowledge that, no matter what, we were getting married that day.
And you know what? Despite all the frustrating moments, I’m glad we did it. It taught us how to work together in new ways, and gave us a(nother) common goal to work towards. And the audience loved it – they didn’t notice our mistakes, or maybe they did, and forgave us for them anyway. That’s being human after all.
Maybe you found some useful advice hidden in this story, even if you didn’t care for the story itself, or maybe you liked the story, but didn’t find it that useful. Who knows, maybe by some miracle, you happened to both like and learn from it. I hope you did.
About the Author
Ian Crewe has been dancing ballroom for over 18 years, and has a Licentiate in American smooth and rhythm. His passion for dance eventually led him to blogging and the World Wide Web. Ian currently teaches at the Joy of Dance Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada.