Bachata Dancing Body Movement

Video Transcript

"All right. Now, before we move on, we just want to talk a little bit about the body movement. We'll start with the hips. As we do our Bachata, we don't want to force the hips. A lot of people think that Latin dancing is all hips, so they try to go like this when they're dancing, and it just looks silly. So don't try to force it. The hips move as a natural result of having one leg bent and the other one straight. See, when you bend one knee, the hip naturally goes out. When you bend the other knee, it goes the other way. So it's just like normal when you walk, your hips naturally move. So don't try to force that. Your hips will naturally go opposite of your feet when you're doing Bachata. So when I step on my right foot, my hip goes to the left. When I step on my left foot, my hip goes to the right. Right foot, hip goes left, and tap. So the hips are going opposite of the foot that I'm on. And then we're also going to add some rib cage movement. To help you isolate that rib cage movement, what you can do is a little exercise where you, basically, keep the lower half of your body completely still. You're going to put your arms like this. Glue your hands to your chest. So you don't want to do it by moving your hands around. You want to keep them stationary here, parallel to the ground, and you're just going to lean and point to the wall over there. And lean and point to the other side. Notice I'm not tilting, like that. That's not it. You're isolating this movement right here, rib cage. Lean and lean, lean, lean. And the rib cage motion goes with the feet. So when I'm on my right foot, my rib cage goes to the right. Left, right, and left, right, left. Rib cage, right, left, right and left, right, left. I'm exaggerating it somewhat, so you can see, but that's the general motion. And then for the arms, we just want to leave them here, hanging comfortably by the waist. We call this home base- palms down, wrists straight, ladies' hands nice and soft, gentlemen- kind of a loose fist. So altogether we've got, one, two, three, and five, six, seven."