Frequently Asked Questions
Want more information about how the Simple Steps program works? Try looking here to see if we've answered your question already!
What exactly do you do?
We offer a 5-part workshop that teaches dance exercises to non-dancers that will literally change the brain to make your awareness and connection and non-verbal communication with your partner improve.
What are "dance exercises"?
If you have ever taken a music class, or seen Disney's Aristicats, you might be familiar with "scales" and "arpeggios" and "drills". These are the fundamentals of all music and musicians practice these fundamentals daily, even when they become experts at their craft.
You may be familiar with Tai Chi or have seen other martial arts practices in movies where a martial artist goes through a daily routine series of movements designed to center the practitioner, focus their attention, and improve their physical fitness and skill.
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Dance has similar fundamentals. We teach basic movements and patterns that, through repetition, form new pathways in the brain that change how the individual views their partner. You do not need to be a dancer or to know how to dance to do these simple yet fundamental exercises that dancers use to help them connect and communicate with their dance partners.
Do I need a partner?
Yes, you will need a partner by halfway through the workshop. Most dance classes do not require you to come with a partner because they rotate the students around the room so that everyone dances with everyone else. This is the best way to learn how to partner dance, and we will be doing this in Parts 2 and 3.
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However, because this is not truly a dance class, but a relationship communication workshop that is using dance as a tool, and because we will be exploring some elements of kink, you will need a dedicated partner that you trust and feel comfortable exploring kink and intimacy with in this class by the time we reach those sections. And since each section builds on the previous one, your dedicated partner will have needed to go through all the previous sections too.
If you do not have a dedicated partner, you may be able to wait until the course sells out, and then attend as a "voyeur", which is a non-participation option that allows extra attendees to "audit" the class as an observer only. More on this in a bit.
Does that mean I do not need a partner for parts 1-3 or that I can take only some of the parts and not all of it?
This workshop is designed to be modular and for each section to build on the prior section. This means that yes, you can choose to pay for each part individually ("a la carte") and you can stop attending when you reach the final part you are interested in.
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But you cannot jump into later sections without having first taken the earlier sections.
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If you are interested only in the science behind our theory, you can sit in on Part 1, which is pure lecture. If you are interested in just the mechanics, you can attend Part 1 - The Lecture and Part 2 - The Mechanics and that's it. If you are not interested in kink or BDSM, you can attend Parts 1-4 and bow out of the final part - The Kink.
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But you cannot attend Part 5 - The Kink, without taking all the other parts. Each section builds on the previous section, and for safety reasons, we need to verify that you understand the building blocks that go into each section, especially Part 5 - The Kink.
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If you purchase tickets to all 5 parts at once, there is a discount, but it is entirely possible to attend only a portion of the entire workshop.
The workshop is all sold out! How can I attend?
Due to spacing and the amount of attention the instructors can give to each participant, we have to cap the number of attendees to our workshop. But there are options if the workshop has sold out!
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1. You can request your community organizer, group, venue, or whoever brought us to your area in the first place to have us come back and hold another session. Because of the repetitious nature of the exercises, it can often benefit attendees to take our workshop more than once. So you may be able to line up enough attendees to convince the organizer to have us come back another time.
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2. You can host us yourself! Think of it like a sexy, dancing, kinky version of a tupperware party. You can hire us to give private lessons as long as you have a space big enough for the exercises. You can invite your friends or partners and metamours and split the cost between all of you, to make it more affordable.
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3. If the venue is accommodating, once we have sold out of active participant slots, we can open up what we call, "voyeur tickets". This is like auditing a college course, where you are allowed to sit in the class but you do not receive a grade and it doesn't count towards your degree. In our case, an auditor or a "voyeur" may sit and observe the workshop without participating, and these tickets will be a discounted price.
Since the real benefit of the exercises is repetition over time, it is possible to achieve the full outcome of the course without actively participating in the class, if you are able to learn the exercises later, without instructor guidance. You will be given access to all the handouts and materials that the active participants will receive.
What if I am polyamorous and have multiple partners?
Ticket sales should be per person and our attendance cap is per "partnership", rather than per "couple". The course is easier to go through with one person to focus your attention on, and partner dancing tends to be based on dyads so our exercises reflect that, but if you have more than one partner who you want to take the workshop with, you can do so.
All of our instructors are non-monogamous or in non-monogamous relationships, so the workshop is built on the idea of individuals working with partners, rather than being "couple-centric". We will even have some important lessons on the dangers of being too couple-centric, while working with the basic dyadic building blocks of intimate relationships.
I've heard that ballroom dancing tends to be heteronormative. Is this workshop queer-friendly?
Absolutely! To both questions! Ballroom, Latin, and swing dancing has traditionally been extremely heteronormative, although there have always been queer-centered dance communities (mostly underground). However, since we are running a relationship workshop and not a hetero dating event, we have no interest in "balancing the genders" or making anyone try to fit into a traditional ballroom mold.
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We are here to help YOUR relationships improve, whatever your relationships are. We have no concerns about anyone's gender, we are only concerned with "leads" and "follows", which we will cover in the course. YOU get to choose which of you is the lead and which of you is the follow.
What if I want to be both lead and follow / I don't know what role I want?
Switching lead and follow is a totally normal thing to do in partner dancing! Although some people would have us believe that traditionally, men are always leads and women are always follows, the fact is that once a dancer reaches a level of proficiency or begins teaching, dancers have a tendency to learn both roles, even if they have a preferred role.
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And there is a growing interest in the ability to not only choose which role a dancer might dance in for a given song, but for dance partners to switch roles right in the middle of a dance! Going back and forth in a single dance is challenging, but dancers of all genders and dance styles are embracing the challenge everywhere these days!
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In Part 2 - The Mechanics, we will be mixing things up so that everyone gets a taste of each role, because we believe that experiencing the other role makes dancers better at their chosen roles. We will cover these roles in depth throughout the workshop, so you will have a chance to understand and choose a role if you do not come to the course knowing which role to take.
However, after Part 2, we will encourage the participants to choose a role for the duration of the course to focus on. Since the benefits of this course are realized after long-term, consistent practice, switching roles at home on your own time after you have had a chance to learn the exercises first is not only an acceptable thing to do, but it is encouraged!
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If you would like to go through the course in both roles, we recommend taking the course twice - one for each role. But if you really want to switch back and forth during the workshop and you and your partner are able to keep up while switching, you're welcome to!
Isn't ballroom dancing mostly for rich white people? Will there be any people of color there?
Yes and no, and maybe. Ballroom dancing as seen on television and in competitions does tend to be monochromatic, but it's a misconception that partner dancing is for and by white people. Much like the poly, swinging, and kink communities have experienced with the media choosing to portray only certain demographics and ignore literally the vast majority of everyone else who participates, partner dancing suffers a similar misconception. Unfortunately, that misconception can create a feedback loop.
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As for who will be there? That depends on the demographics of your local community who is hosting us. We will do our best to reach out to POC communities, but as we are not local, the attendees will very likely be made up of whomever the organizer is most in touch with. If you would like a more diverse workshop than what you feel the local organizer is likely to bring in, please contact us so we can work with you on how to accomplish that in your area.
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The creator of this workshop is chicana, although she is often mistaken for white. The principles and fundamentals of partner dancing encompass many more people and cultures than just the WASPy stereotype of ballroom dancers. By definition, Latin dancing is created by and for Latine cultures, and all forms of swing dancing evolved out of the Harlem jazz clubs that catered to black and brown communities. Although both of those dance genres are their own categories, they also both overlap with the genre of "ballroom dance" in a big Venn Diagram under the umbrella of "partner dance".
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Partner dancing has a rich and diverse history that cannot escape the entanglement with music and politics. Although the sociopolitical and cross-cultural examination of dance is outside the scope of this workshop, it is interwoven throughout dance culture and informs the perspective of the founder of this workshop.
But I can't dance!
That's OK, you don't have to! The first part of this workshop is a classroom style lecture going over the science of what we teach. There is no dancing at all. The second part is the exercises - again, no dancing! We teach you how to move and how to communicate, that's it!
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The third part starts the dance lessons, but it's the very very beginning. And since the focus of the workshop is on communication, getting the dancing perfect is not the goal. We are going to cover several different dance styles just so that you have a background understanding of what we will be covering next.
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Part 4 is where we teach you a simple routine that puts into action all of the things we have been learning so far, from the mental connection to the movement to the lead and follow to the dance patterns. This is something you can memorize if dancing does not come easy to you, or something you can take home and play with if dancing is a little less challenging for you.
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And finally, we will take that simple routine and kink it up for you! By incorporating just a few minor modifications, you will learn how to add an element of D/s to your dancing, or you can take these lessons and add some dancing into your D/s or bondage or take-down scenes at home or at the dungeon! When the music is pumping and you're in the zone, you can throw in a little twist here or a hold there and spice up your social dancing, or include some artistic flare in your scening.
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The important part is that your connection and communication improves to the point that you can choose to incorporate new elements into either your dancing or your kink, because you will have been practicing the very things that make it possible.
It doesn't matter if you like dancing and are looking to spice it up, or if you do not dance and just want some novelty in your scenes. What matters is building and maintaining your connection to your partner so that you can make these choices together, even spontaneously and non-verbally if desired.
This is all very interesting but I was looking for something a little less involved / less structured / not sure what I want just not this.
That's OK! We have other options! Head on over to our other page, Dance Party Starters, to see what other kinds of dance options we can bring to your events and parties. And if you still don't see what you're looking for, contact us either through Simple Steps or through Dance Party Starters and talk us through what you're looking for and we'll see if we can't come up with something that works for you, your event, or your community.
We have a variety of services, performances, and activities, and we can work with a diverse group or community. We have done keynote lectures and team-building in corporate settings, we have done line dance lessons for disabled and neurodivergent children, we have done 1920s flapper parties as entertainment, we have done church events, we have promoted live bands, we have hosted and DJ'd themed parties, we have performed at art festivals and weddings - we can find a way to incorporate dance into almost anything! We can also work with a range of budgets.
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In addition, we give non-dance related workshops and presentations as well, mostly centering around relationships and communication. We have a talk on how to compassionately break up, Love Languages for non-traditional or non-monogamous relationships, Love Languages and trauma, personality type systems, the intersection of polyamory and skepticism, the sociopolitical history of dance styles, a whole slew of costume and historical fashion lectures and workshops, and we even offer media training with a full workshop on how to give a presentation from a professional conference technician.
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So if you don't see what you want, let us know and we'll see what we can do.