Secrets of Looking Good on the Dance Floor | Hacker News Reader

Secrets of Looking Good on the Dance Floor

spiegel.de

66 pointsmhb33 comments

I've spent thousands on dance instruction from hip-hop to salsa to ballroom.

In my opinion, if you have confidence on the dance floor -that will make you look pretty good because confidence is attractive. It takes courage to dance in public, especially freestyle.

When you have possess skill in tandem with confidence to put yourself out there, that is what makes awesome dancers. For hip-hop, that means hitting the off beats. Skill + Confidence.

Many of the best dancers I know have that combination. Dancing. It's not about looks. It's not solely moves. It's about being with the moment. It's about owning the floor.

    When you take dancing lessons, you learn steps and
    you learn steps and you learn steps. It can go on 
    for a long time. And then one day, you just learn 
    to dance, and it is so different.                 

    - Bill Austin

Right, but how do you measure "confidence" or "owning the floor"?

Subjective peer ratings. Plus if you were to go to any given club, you can usually tell who has it, on the dance floor.

Not everything can be measured. There is a reason why there are no accurate algorithms to detect the beat (most rely on tapping a keyboard or pad) - it's complex and simple at the same time.

I think that the article implies that subjective confidence levels may be tied to objective testosterone levels, which seems completely reasonable to me.

In light of this I like your choice of username.

They're kind of rare, but I've seen very confident people on the dance floor who were simply awful. I mean really, really, embarrassingly bad. Trainwreck bad.

They were definitely in no way attractive. And you kind of wished they'd had no confidence at all. But there they were, like an atomic bomb going off in the middle of the dance floor, making Austin Powers look timid.

I'm jealous of these people. I hope to be that fearless some day.

I learned a long time ago that you can't learn that kind of fearlessness. You can gain confidence, become more comfortable in social situations, but you will never have a certain level of fearlessness that some people exhibit.

Do you have references concerning this ?

Not a reference, per se, but the intriguing diary of a guy who talked to a new stranger for thirty days in a row.

http://socialskydivingwithjustin.posterous.com

I've danced recreationally for about 18 years, also occasionally teaching, performing, or competing, but I found nothing familiar in this article. I imagine it might also be discouraging for many people to be informed by someone portrayed as a scientific authority that dancing ability is determined at birth.

To keep it topical for HN, there is one thing I would say qualifies as a dance hack, although it sounds like a cliche, which is good posture. It should maintained not just while dancing but from the moment one enters the room. Although it's emphasized mainly in ballroom dance, it applies to any form. It works because we read it subliminally as a high status behavior, and faking it won't occur to the people who could most benefit by it.

Eighteen years. Wow. You are basically a professional dancer. Professional dancers should be able to 1) be able to perform or compete at a high level 2) teach and 3) dance socially.

One thing I left out in my earlier comments is the people who have been dancing for a long time can inadvertently intimidate newbies - particularly for ballroom - because at the dance club they see these really experienced dancers glide across the floor - and they think - how can I dance with these people who are so good and/or dance on the same floor. The nicer dancers will ask newbies to dance because they remember when they were starting out, in simultaneous awe and intimidation.

Another dance hack, especially for Latin dancing, is understanding the structure of the music so that you can predict changes in the music with good probability.

For example, in Salsa music, listen for a change in the music, count 8 measures and anticipate a break, and if there is no break, count another 8 (16 total) and anticipate the break. Sometimes it gets to 24 before there is a break and followers love it when you can predict these breaks (dance to the music).

It is actually a lot, lot harder to do this when you are social dancing and trying to protect your follower (crowded dance floor) - but it is doable.

The other part is tempo changes - vary the speed of your moves to the tempo and feel of the music. Slow things down, speed things up.

When I watching myself on video, I notice these things:

1) bad posture;

2) improper positions of head, hands, hips, foots, etc.;

4) small steps or movements without power;

3) incorrect movements or steps.

So +1 on good posture, which is result of proper emotion. I even created special trainer for that. :-)

PS. 4 years in ballroom sport dancing (10 dances).

It's important to note (the article does, but it's worth emphasizing) that the correlation for coordinated dance moves is not with present testosterone levels, it's with pre-natal testosterone exposure. The first is measured with blood tests, the second with finger lengths. Present testosterone levels correlate strongly with height, muscle definition, and beard thickness. Prenatal testosterone levels correlate with "male-typical" personality traits (increased visuospatial abilities, impaired empathy and language skills), taste bud insensitivity, autism incidence, homosexuality incidence, and decreased autoacoustic emissions.

In short, the best dancers aren't necessarily jocks, they're geeks and homosexuals.

Honestly, I'd like to see this same study performed with self-identifying homosexuals screened out from the sample pool, as they tend to have much higher 4d:2d finger-length ratios and could drastically affect the results. I'd bet money that the correlation still persists, but the social dynamics are so obviously different between straight and gay men at a dance club that it's worth controlling for.

Not to mention, gay guys, in general, are dramatically better dancers than straight guys. (Stereotypes aren't always accurate, but, honestly, anybody want to argue about this one?)

The few times I've been out to a gay dance club I've noticed that the vibe is really fun - most of the guys there are dancing without inhibition, even if they aren't great dancers (compare to the hetero club dance floor).

The article doesn't cite a paper, so I can't check these criticisms out in detail, but:

- If the people rating the dancers were watching silhouettes, then they were evaluating the attractiveness of the dancers' body-shapes, too.

- If Lovatt is "entering uncharted territory", that might mean nobody is checking his work.

- I can't find any publications on Google Scholar authored by this guy for "Peter Lovatt", "Peter Lovatt Dance", or "Lovatt Dance". Bad sign.

Take this article with a grain of salt, it has several markers of pseudoscience.

You can still see people's body shapes in a silhouette.

Exactly. I'm suggesting that there's a rather-important-yet-unaddressed confounding variable in the analysis.

Oh I see, I misunderstood the whole situation! I agree, your issue is pertinent.

They should have filmed their subjects over the span of sobriety to high levels of intoxication. The results would be interesting since confidence should go up, but coordination should, at some point, drop off.

The secret of learning how to partner dance:

http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-on...

Those men who made big moves but who were less coordinated came across as dominant alpha males -- and were unlikely to win women's hearts.

...

He wasn't even able to read until he was 23

This should be in the WTF subreddit.

This reminded me of the last time I saw this guy in the popular press when he said he found that dancing like Travolta from Saturday Night Fever was really attractive to women.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Lifestyle/Dance_like_Trav...

In general evolution theory inspires me, but I have to admit it ruined dancing for me. After all, it seems like the perfect way to demonstrate physical and mental fitness (mental fitness with the coordination skills). Realizing that completely took the joy out of it for me.

Why did that ruin it for you? Things need not be pointless in order to be fun...

I can't do it just for the sake of dancing anymore. I know what I would really be doing, and I resent playing the game.

If one is to believe psychologist Peter Lovatt, three factors influence how confidently an individual moves on the dance floor -- and how attractive the other gender finds the performance. Those factors are age, gender and genes.

Age, Gender and Genes? That really narrows it down, now doesn't it. Reading on, testosterone is what influences how big your dancing movements are, which makes sense.

_Prenatal exposure to testosterone_, which is not exactly an obvious correlation.

Do NOT bite your lower lip!

Why not?

I think it is more like programming. The more you program, the better you find what works and what doesn't, the better your programming becomes.

Except causation != correlation?

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