Is TIPDI for Me & My Dance Background?
1. I only know 1 of the partner dances. I never took ballet, modern, or any African dance. Am I going to be okay at TIPDI?
2. I know Classical or Ethnic or Theater dance*, but I have not studied any of the partner dances. Am I going to be okay at TIPDI? *(Ballet, Modern, African & African Diaspora, Contemporary, Jazz, Musical Theater Dance, Classical Indian, Classical Balinese)
3. I know WCS, or Salsa, or Tango. How exactly will Ballet, Modern, and Afro-Haitian improve my dancing?
4. I know Ballet, or Modern, or African, or Theater Dance. How exactly will WCS, Salsa, and Tango improve my dancing?
5. I'm a break-on-1 Salsa dancer. Will your classes be "On 2"? Will I be okay?
6. I know Ballroom, or Hustle, or Zouk, or Lindy, or Balboa, or Ceroc, or Blues, or East Coast Swing, or Hand Dancing, or Jitterbug, or Bugg, or Boogie Woogie. But I don't know the 3 partner dances you are doing. Am I going to be okay at TIPDI?
7. Will TIPDI really make me amazing?
Scroll down for the amazing, informative answers!
Other frequent questions:
• That's a lot of classes. Are classes mandatory, or can we take breaks? See our FAQ page.
• I can only come for Saturday & Sunday. Will that be a problem? Is there a reduced price? See our FAQ page.
• I would like to come for only 1 or 2 classes, on a drop-in basis. Will that be possible? Is there a reduced price? See our FAQ page.
2. I know Classical or Ethnic or Theater dance*, but I have not studied any of the partner dances. Am I going to be okay at TIPDI? *(Ballet, Modern, African & African Diaspora, Contemporary, Jazz, Musical Theater Dance, Classical Indian, Classical Balinese)
3. I know WCS, or Salsa, or Tango. How exactly will Ballet, Modern, and Afro-Haitian improve my dancing?
4. I know Ballet, or Modern, or African, or Theater Dance. How exactly will WCS, Salsa, and Tango improve my dancing?
5. I'm a break-on-1 Salsa dancer. Will your classes be "On 2"? Will I be okay?
6. I know Ballroom, or Hustle, or Zouk, or Lindy, or Balboa, or Ceroc, or Blues, or East Coast Swing, or Hand Dancing, or Jitterbug, or Bugg, or Boogie Woogie. But I don't know the 3 partner dances you are doing. Am I going to be okay at TIPDI?
7. Will TIPDI really make me amazing?
Scroll down for the amazing, informative answers!
Other frequent questions:
• That's a lot of classes. Are classes mandatory, or can we take breaks? See our FAQ page.
• I can only come for Saturday & Sunday. Will that be a problem? Is there a reduced price? See our FAQ page.
• I would like to come for only 1 or 2 classes, on a drop-in basis. Will that be possible? Is there a reduced price? See our FAQ page.
1. I only know 1 of the TIPDI partner dances. I never took ballet, modern, or any African dance. Am I going to be okay at TIPDI?
Yes! Emphatically yes! Almost everyone at TIPDI will be just like you. You are exactly who TIPDI is for. All of your classes will be welcoming, and will be geared for your level of experience and skill. That means you will be in one of the upper levels for your best dance, and probably in "accelerated beginner" level for all the others. Our beginner classes are unique. There are no non-dancers at TIPDI, so our teachers will be teaching accelerated beginner classes that will build on the partner dance skills that you already have. We are the ONLY program where the teachers assume you can already dance, just maybe not their particular dance. They won't waste your time. And they will work on stuff that you can borrow back into your primary dance. Register now!
2. I know Classical or Ethnic or Theater dance* or Movement for Actors, but I have not studied any of the partner dances. Am I going to be okay at TIPDI?
*(Ballet, Modern, African & African Diaspora, Contemporary, Jazz, Musical Theater Dance, Movement for Actors, Classical Indian, Classical Balinese)
Yes! Emphatically yes! A lot of people at TIPDI will be just like you. You are exactly who TIPDI is for. All of your classes will be welcoming, and will be geared for your level of experience and skill. That means you will be in one of the upper levels for your best dances, and probably in "accelerated beginner" level for all the others. Our beginner classes are unique. There are no non-dancers at TIPDI, so our teachers will be teaching accelerated beginner classes that will build on the dance skills that you already have. They won't waste your time. There is no better program anywhere for quickly learning all 3 of these fantastic partner dances. We are the ONLY program where the teachers assume you can already dance, just maybe not their particular dance. Register now!
3. I know WCS, or Salsa, or Tango. How exactly will Ballet, Modern, and Afro-Haitian improve my dancing?
Ahhh – this is the "secret sauce" that all the great partner dancers know about and spend years acquiring. You can do it in 3 days at TIPDI! This is perhaps the most powerful magic at TIPDI.
(1) All partner dancers need to know how to "dance from their core" or "move from their center." This is what separates the truly good WCS, Salsa, and Tango dancers from all the rest of us. This elusive but crucial skill is taught superbly by our 3 extraordinary teachers of Ballet, Modern, and Afro-Haitian. TIPDI is your very best chance to learn it in one quick shot. Register now!
(2) Ballet will help your balance, your lines, your unity, your centering, your control, your poise and, if you keep going with it, your strength. You will also learn how to automatically do beautiful things with your free arm — something that WCS and Salsa dancers are always challenged by! You will learn intensively how to feel the floor and stay balanced over the balls of your feet except when necessary — skills that are indispensable in WCS, Salsa, and Tango. Additionally, ballet emphasizes keeping your torso and hips together as a coherent single unit, unified but flexible. That unity, pulling everything together into a coherent whole, might be the single most important thing that distinguishes the great partner dancers. Ballet even extends that idea to help you create a single unified line (or set of lines) through your entire body, making your WCS, Salsa, or Tango look elegant and just plain great. Ballet also teaches you to push through the floor, to land in balance, and to have a far better sense of your body flight and dynamics in space. Register now!
(3) Modern dance will expand your whole sense of your body in the room and on the floor, as well as give you a massive dose of new ideas for movement and gestures. You will learn a confidence and power in your dancing that is always present in the best dancers, and always absent in the rest of us. Modern dance focuses as much attention on the transitions between steps, the weight shift, the energy, and the sense of connection to the floor, as it does on actual steps. Modern dance is also excellent brain training. You will begin to see a marked improvement in your ability to see movement and apply it immediately to your own body. This is a hugely helpful skill when learning new moves and new stylings, plus it makes it easier to analyze what is working or not working in your own dance practice. Register now!
(4) Afro-Haitian dance is one of the many African-based dance forms we could have added. We just happen to be bringing you one of the greatest teachers in New York, Adia Whitaker, and she teaches Afro-Haitian. In all of the African dance forms, you gain skills in loosening everything in your body while still maintaining yourself as a coherent, unified self. This is a perfect complement to ballet and modern, which are generally much tighter. Afro-Haitian will give you powerful but controlled booty-and-body-shaking skills that you need for dancing hot WCS and Salsa without thrashing like a fool. And it will give you a much more powerful command of the body flexibility needed for the "torque" (twist) actions that are absolutely necessary in Tango. Afro-Haitian will give you much better skills in "staying down" into the floor, which will improve all your spins in WCS and Salsa (which are done down, not up as in ballet), and will help you to maintain a perfect one-foot balance in Tango. Not to mention that the African dance tradition is the direct ancestor of Salsa and Swing. You have to know it if you want to reach the fundamental personality of Swing and Salsa! Register now!
4. I know Ballet, or Modern, or African, or Theater Dance. How exactly will WCS, Salsa, and Tango improve my dancing?
As you already know, in Ballet and Modern in particular, there is an emphasis on finding your own center of balance, your own place in space. Even in partnering work, one half of the partnership is usually doing the majority of the movement, while the other half supports them. In all African-origin dances, the individual dancer is hugely important, and there is little emphasis on partner skills per se.
Dances like West Coast Swing, Salsa, and Tango are entirely about moving with another person, and require a complete awareness of not only your place in space, but your partner's place in space, as well. It is a completely different skill set, and it can improve your ability to improvise with other dancers, your awareness of space, your sense of timing, and your musicality.
Here are some particular points that make partner dancing so challenging — and so rewarding! — to classically trained dancers and actors. You will suddenly have to expand all of your skills to accommodate letting someone else spontaneously determine when, where, and how far you move, when you turn, how fast and how far you turn, how you relate to the beat in the music (in some partner dances, you will want to be behind the beat, while in others you will want to be right on the front edge of the beat), and so on. You will find yourself working with two centers of balance, namely your own and a new center that is somewhere in between you and your partner — and that "in between" balance is different in all three partner dances. You will find that in the partner dances, turns and spins are done "down," not up, for best balance and success, and the arms are maintained in what appear to be droopy, low-elbow shapes that greatly assist a light, aware, elastic connection to your partner — but are not droopy at all, and are different in all three partner dances.
Each of the partner dances offered at TIPDI uses a different embrace, different footwork, different points of shared weight, and different shared axis points. Once you understand all of them, you will have an incredible new vocabulary to pull from in your classical dance work. If you are a musical theater performer, knowing how to dance the solid basics of Tango, Salsa, or WCS can be hugely helpful at auditions, as well. You will find TIPDI intriguing, fun, and a very cool way of broadening your technique skills and versatility! Register now!
5. I'm a break-on-1 Salsa dancer. Will your classes be "On 2"? Will I be okay?
Yes, our classes will be taught "On 2." In general, we think you won't have a problem, provided you already have at least 2 or 3 years of Salsa on 1. You will find your brain being stretched, and your dancing becoming vastly better overall. As you make the shift into contemporary "On 2" Salsa, you will find that you'll keep falling back into "On 1" footwork, especially every time you come out of a turn. You will also quickly notice that some figures remain identical, while others need to be shaped a bit differently to work in On 2 dancing (primarily the Cross-Body Lead — but it's not a big change). You will just have to concentrate like crazy until it all becomes automatic. This happened to us and everyone we know. And then you will be internationally fluent in Salsa! You will also find that your body moves somewhat differently as a result of the On 2 stuff, and that's a great set of new skills and "flavors" to bring back to your On 1 dancing. If you have a chance to take even a single On 2 class in June or July before you come to TIPDI (or even just practice with a youtube video for a few minutes), that will start the mental process and you will find the transition to On 2 will go much faster.
You will find that almost all of the social Salsa in NYC is "On 2," but about half of the dancers also know "On 1." We recommend that you practice, practice, practice your On 2 dancing while you are here in New York, completely immersing yourself in it so as to become as "fluent" as you can as quickly as possible. But if your brain just melts and you need an On 1 break, people here can dance it with you.
For a complete and detailed description of the differences between Salsa on 1, Salsa "On 2," and original Mambo (which is what Ballroom dancers do), including a tutorial on how to convert your Break-On-1 to On-2, see this web page written by our Associate Director. Register now!
6. I know Ballroom, or Hustle, or Zouk, or Lindy, or Balboa, or Ceroc, or Blues, or East Coast Swing, or Hand Dancing, or Jitterbug, or Bugg, or Boogie Woogie. But I don't know the 3 partner dances you are doing. Am I going to be okay at TIPDI?
If you have a strong background of 2 or 3 years, preferably more, in any of those partner dances, you will be fine. You will probably find yourself in the Fast Track "accelerated beginner" level for all six of our dance forms, not having deep experience in any of them yet, but you will totally enjoy the mind-bending immersive experience. And the new technique skills, moves, and "flavors" that you pick up will hugely enhance your Ballroom, Hustle, Lindy, Bal, Blues, etc. Register now!
7. Will TIPDI really make me amazing?
Yes. Actually, you are already amazing, dahling. TIPDI will simply make it much easier for everyone to see that. Register now!
Yes! Emphatically yes! Almost everyone at TIPDI will be just like you. You are exactly who TIPDI is for. All of your classes will be welcoming, and will be geared for your level of experience and skill. That means you will be in one of the upper levels for your best dance, and probably in "accelerated beginner" level for all the others. Our beginner classes are unique. There are no non-dancers at TIPDI, so our teachers will be teaching accelerated beginner classes that will build on the partner dance skills that you already have. We are the ONLY program where the teachers assume you can already dance, just maybe not their particular dance. They won't waste your time. And they will work on stuff that you can borrow back into your primary dance. Register now!
2. I know Classical or Ethnic or Theater dance* or Movement for Actors, but I have not studied any of the partner dances. Am I going to be okay at TIPDI?
*(Ballet, Modern, African & African Diaspora, Contemporary, Jazz, Musical Theater Dance, Movement for Actors, Classical Indian, Classical Balinese)
Yes! Emphatically yes! A lot of people at TIPDI will be just like you. You are exactly who TIPDI is for. All of your classes will be welcoming, and will be geared for your level of experience and skill. That means you will be in one of the upper levels for your best dances, and probably in "accelerated beginner" level for all the others. Our beginner classes are unique. There are no non-dancers at TIPDI, so our teachers will be teaching accelerated beginner classes that will build on the dance skills that you already have. They won't waste your time. There is no better program anywhere for quickly learning all 3 of these fantastic partner dances. We are the ONLY program where the teachers assume you can already dance, just maybe not their particular dance. Register now!
3. I know WCS, or Salsa, or Tango. How exactly will Ballet, Modern, and Afro-Haitian improve my dancing?
Ahhh – this is the "secret sauce" that all the great partner dancers know about and spend years acquiring. You can do it in 3 days at TIPDI! This is perhaps the most powerful magic at TIPDI.
(1) All partner dancers need to know how to "dance from their core" or "move from their center." This is what separates the truly good WCS, Salsa, and Tango dancers from all the rest of us. This elusive but crucial skill is taught superbly by our 3 extraordinary teachers of Ballet, Modern, and Afro-Haitian. TIPDI is your very best chance to learn it in one quick shot. Register now!
(2) Ballet will help your balance, your lines, your unity, your centering, your control, your poise and, if you keep going with it, your strength. You will also learn how to automatically do beautiful things with your free arm — something that WCS and Salsa dancers are always challenged by! You will learn intensively how to feel the floor and stay balanced over the balls of your feet except when necessary — skills that are indispensable in WCS, Salsa, and Tango. Additionally, ballet emphasizes keeping your torso and hips together as a coherent single unit, unified but flexible. That unity, pulling everything together into a coherent whole, might be the single most important thing that distinguishes the great partner dancers. Ballet even extends that idea to help you create a single unified line (or set of lines) through your entire body, making your WCS, Salsa, or Tango look elegant and just plain great. Ballet also teaches you to push through the floor, to land in balance, and to have a far better sense of your body flight and dynamics in space. Register now!
(3) Modern dance will expand your whole sense of your body in the room and on the floor, as well as give you a massive dose of new ideas for movement and gestures. You will learn a confidence and power in your dancing that is always present in the best dancers, and always absent in the rest of us. Modern dance focuses as much attention on the transitions between steps, the weight shift, the energy, and the sense of connection to the floor, as it does on actual steps. Modern dance is also excellent brain training. You will begin to see a marked improvement in your ability to see movement and apply it immediately to your own body. This is a hugely helpful skill when learning new moves and new stylings, plus it makes it easier to analyze what is working or not working in your own dance practice. Register now!
(4) Afro-Haitian dance is one of the many African-based dance forms we could have added. We just happen to be bringing you one of the greatest teachers in New York, Adia Whitaker, and she teaches Afro-Haitian. In all of the African dance forms, you gain skills in loosening everything in your body while still maintaining yourself as a coherent, unified self. This is a perfect complement to ballet and modern, which are generally much tighter. Afro-Haitian will give you powerful but controlled booty-and-body-shaking skills that you need for dancing hot WCS and Salsa without thrashing like a fool. And it will give you a much more powerful command of the body flexibility needed for the "torque" (twist) actions that are absolutely necessary in Tango. Afro-Haitian will give you much better skills in "staying down" into the floor, which will improve all your spins in WCS and Salsa (which are done down, not up as in ballet), and will help you to maintain a perfect one-foot balance in Tango. Not to mention that the African dance tradition is the direct ancestor of Salsa and Swing. You have to know it if you want to reach the fundamental personality of Swing and Salsa! Register now!
4. I know Ballet, or Modern, or African, or Theater Dance. How exactly will WCS, Salsa, and Tango improve my dancing?
As you already know, in Ballet and Modern in particular, there is an emphasis on finding your own center of balance, your own place in space. Even in partnering work, one half of the partnership is usually doing the majority of the movement, while the other half supports them. In all African-origin dances, the individual dancer is hugely important, and there is little emphasis on partner skills per se.
Dances like West Coast Swing, Salsa, and Tango are entirely about moving with another person, and require a complete awareness of not only your place in space, but your partner's place in space, as well. It is a completely different skill set, and it can improve your ability to improvise with other dancers, your awareness of space, your sense of timing, and your musicality.
Here are some particular points that make partner dancing so challenging — and so rewarding! — to classically trained dancers and actors. You will suddenly have to expand all of your skills to accommodate letting someone else spontaneously determine when, where, and how far you move, when you turn, how fast and how far you turn, how you relate to the beat in the music (in some partner dances, you will want to be behind the beat, while in others you will want to be right on the front edge of the beat), and so on. You will find yourself working with two centers of balance, namely your own and a new center that is somewhere in between you and your partner — and that "in between" balance is different in all three partner dances. You will find that in the partner dances, turns and spins are done "down," not up, for best balance and success, and the arms are maintained in what appear to be droopy, low-elbow shapes that greatly assist a light, aware, elastic connection to your partner — but are not droopy at all, and are different in all three partner dances.
Each of the partner dances offered at TIPDI uses a different embrace, different footwork, different points of shared weight, and different shared axis points. Once you understand all of them, you will have an incredible new vocabulary to pull from in your classical dance work. If you are a musical theater performer, knowing how to dance the solid basics of Tango, Salsa, or WCS can be hugely helpful at auditions, as well. You will find TIPDI intriguing, fun, and a very cool way of broadening your technique skills and versatility! Register now!
5. I'm a break-on-1 Salsa dancer. Will your classes be "On 2"? Will I be okay?
Yes, our classes will be taught "On 2." In general, we think you won't have a problem, provided you already have at least 2 or 3 years of Salsa on 1. You will find your brain being stretched, and your dancing becoming vastly better overall. As you make the shift into contemporary "On 2" Salsa, you will find that you'll keep falling back into "On 1" footwork, especially every time you come out of a turn. You will also quickly notice that some figures remain identical, while others need to be shaped a bit differently to work in On 2 dancing (primarily the Cross-Body Lead — but it's not a big change). You will just have to concentrate like crazy until it all becomes automatic. This happened to us and everyone we know. And then you will be internationally fluent in Salsa! You will also find that your body moves somewhat differently as a result of the On 2 stuff, and that's a great set of new skills and "flavors" to bring back to your On 1 dancing. If you have a chance to take even a single On 2 class in June or July before you come to TIPDI (or even just practice with a youtube video for a few minutes), that will start the mental process and you will find the transition to On 2 will go much faster.
You will find that almost all of the social Salsa in NYC is "On 2," but about half of the dancers also know "On 1." We recommend that you practice, practice, practice your On 2 dancing while you are here in New York, completely immersing yourself in it so as to become as "fluent" as you can as quickly as possible. But if your brain just melts and you need an On 1 break, people here can dance it with you.
For a complete and detailed description of the differences between Salsa on 1, Salsa "On 2," and original Mambo (which is what Ballroom dancers do), including a tutorial on how to convert your Break-On-1 to On-2, see this web page written by our Associate Director. Register now!
6. I know Ballroom, or Hustle, or Zouk, or Lindy, or Balboa, or Ceroc, or Blues, or East Coast Swing, or Hand Dancing, or Jitterbug, or Bugg, or Boogie Woogie. But I don't know the 3 partner dances you are doing. Am I going to be okay at TIPDI?
If you have a strong background of 2 or 3 years, preferably more, in any of those partner dances, you will be fine. You will probably find yourself in the Fast Track "accelerated beginner" level for all six of our dance forms, not having deep experience in any of them yet, but you will totally enjoy the mind-bending immersive experience. And the new technique skills, moves, and "flavors" that you pick up will hugely enhance your Ballroom, Hustle, Lindy, Bal, Blues, etc. Register now!
7. Will TIPDI really make me amazing?
Yes. Actually, you are already amazing, dahling. TIPDI will simply make it much easier for everyone to see that. Register now!