With the current pandemic, service industries (like Arthur Murray Dance Studios) have had to make quicker pivots than a ballroom champion.
Without the high touch, face to face experience our company has relied upon for over 100 years, the current situation has sparked a new option or, daresay, a new era in how dance lessons are taught:
Digital Dance Lessons.
Yes, this probably isn't news to you now, but digital dance lessons are a thing and, believe it or not, they have revealed some incredible advantages that we never realized would be there. Here are 8 of our favorites.
We all have three primary ways of learning: Visual, Auditory, and Physical.
When one of those three is missing, the other two become more heightened. Without the physical element on a dance lesson, the verbal and visual elements of the lesson have taken on a whole new emphasis.
This has required teachers to get more creative to make lessons more engaging for the eyes and ears, and our students have been able to lock in and process finer details and techniques at a more rapid pace.
Having a teacher in physical contact with you can mask balance issues. To build a skill, you must challenge that skill, and the challenge of executing dance steps without the assistance of a teacher has caused an unprecedented level of improvement in the balance department.
Being that vacations are essentially a no-go and normal date night activities are on pause, that doesn't mean that your social calendar has to suffer any more.
Dance lessons have been a unique and classy experience before the pandemic and they continue to be - digital or in person.
A digital dance lesson usually includes more repetition than a typical "hands-on" dance lesson. What may have only taken 1-2 attempts with a hands on lesson is now requiring more repetition to fully develop. Those extra reps have created great muscle memory for our students.
The benefit: More confidence in the material now means less confusion in the long run.
Skill based lessons, like arm styling, are a hot ticket with digital dance lessons because they create a singular focus and measurable result.
If you've already tried some, then you'll certainly agree that this pandemic may be the best thing that's happened to your arm styling. Not to mention, there's a compound effect with arms in that the improvement can be added to a variety of dances later.
Sometimes posture can be an elusive skill for your teacher to pinpoint. A big part to that comes from the fact that you're typically moving, with your teacher, when the posture begins to fade. This is much trickier to track than, say, your posture when you walk into a room.
A little distance can give your teacher just the right perspective to pinpoint the improvement - and digital lessons do just that.
With posture as a primary focus, and with your teacher watching you on screen, the posture improvement you need will have nowhere to go but up.
For our more advanced students, techniques like Cuban Motion have continued to excel through the use of digital instruction. Similar to #5 (Posture), the teacher has a different vantage point on the action because of the distance and add the appropriate layer combined with repetition.
The result is more layers of refinement provided by your teacher with a broadband vantage point.
In case you didn't know, understanding the timing in dancing is pretty important. If that seems a bit obvious here's something that may not be: The timing is important for both the leader and the follower.
The better you understand and move to the correct timing in the music, the more you will own and feel confident in your steps. One of the biggest revelations through digital instruction has been our students (leaders and followers) developing the ability to count and dance with the music at a much faster rate.
Arthur Murray set himself apart by making dance lessons easy enough that anyone could learn. At the core of our company's values is a relentless pursuit to make dancing fun, quick, and easy for anyone - regardless of age, experience, or event the medium used to receive the lesson.
The same teachers that have made it their career to turn the most unlikely people into full fledged dancers are at the cutting edge of digital dance instruction with the same amount of effort, energy, and training.
Let's think of this less in the dance technique sense and more in the big picture. The ability for our students and teachers to dance and reconnect has been a light for many dark tunnels out there.
Arthur Murray students have referred to their studios as everything from their "home away from home", their "staycation", or their "private club for self improvement".
Digital Dance Lessons have created connection to those feelings, the dance program that got them there, and the dance team that lit the pathway.
News flash - Challenges are easy to avoid.
But some of the best opportunities are gift wrapped in the biggest challenges. Whether it was the challenge of a new job, going on a blind date, or driving a car for the first time - those challenges helped to add positive benefits and learning experiences to your life.
The new digital era of dance lessons, and the benefits they offer, would never have been revealed had it not been for this present challenge of Covid-19. We didn't choose to teach lessons like this, but we have made a choice to pour our heart into it to find all the benefits.
So what benefits have you found the most helpful with digital dance lessons? Let us know in the comments below.
Image credit: Photo by Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash