Every class of Street Jive (SJ) is conducted in a workshop format, which ensures that you can enjoy detailed instruction at both group and individual level, regardless of whether you are a beginner or advanced dancer. By detail, we mean the little hints, tips and tricks bought by experience on the dance floor, that make the difference between just doing the move and dancing it. The workshop format allows us to help you learn faster by giving accurate and constructive feedback very quickly. This is only possible with the kind of teaching ratio that we have.

The content of each workshop is flexibly tailored to the abilities of the students in the class. The method of instruction is highly interactive between students and teachers, running to the extent of accommodating requests for particular moves, techniques and music. As a matter of fact, this level of feedback from students is positively encouraged!

What SJ has in common with its French jive cousins is that it focuses predominantly on the use of the arms during dancing. Well, at least in the early stages. This makes dancing much faster and easier to learn, since you don’t have to be overly concerned with arm-leg co-ordination. Skills such as hand changes, their different conformations during turns, leading and following are all tackled sooner, and enable a newcomer to take to the dance floor after just one short lesson.

After this, SJ and the other jives part company.

We believe that ALL moves should be leadable (and therefore followable), so you are taught how to lead and follow right from the start, and that includes turns and spins. SJ avoids the “unled turn followed immediately by a reverse turn” formula in the commercial jives.

Moves are all taught in the same manner, in that a basic (or root) move is first introduced. You are then taught how to change and adapt it to produce new and more complex variations of the same move. This method of variation-based learning stimulates and preserves the sense of creativity while ensuring that all moves in SJ stay leadable. You are also taught how to string different root moves together to form longer combinations. Once you become fluent with these skills, the ability to improvise freely is but one small step away.

Oh, and did we mention that you get plenty of opportunity to practise what you have learned, and to the music of your choice? What a great way to learn.