Introduction to Cha-Cha Dancing for Beginners

Series Summary

The famous cha-cha ballroom dance was invented in Cuba in the late 1940’s and early 50’s from a new musical style developed by composer and violinist Enrique Jorrín known as cha-cha-cha, or chachachá, which combined rumba and mambo rhythms. The name comes from the sound that the dancers’ shoes would make on the floor when moving to this new beat. The cha-cha is danced in 4/4 time, requiring small steps and a lot of hip motion. It remains a popular dance in international competitions.

In this series of free video dance lessons you’ll learn how to dance the cha-cha-cha. Expert Leslie Sack will teach you all the basic steps of the ballroom cha-cha, including how to get the right posture, understanding the rhythm of the dance, and a variety of breaks, crossovers, and turns that will have you dancing like a real pro in no time.

Video Transcript

"This is Leslie Sack with expertvillage.com. My website is lesliesack.com and this is Cha-Cha, it’s my favorite dance. What you want to learn is the basic rhythm and we’re going to just do the easy version first and then I’m going to show you a different way to do it a little bit later. So we’re going to walk, step, one, two, three, that’s called a rock step, where you just change your weight and then you do triple step, one, two, three, rock, step, cha-cha-cha, rock, step, cha-cha-cha, rock, step. So you’re going to be going back on your right foot and cha-cha-cha, forward on your left, one, two, three. The most important thing is just keep backing up like this, you get confused by doing the other patterns you’re just going to keep saying to yourself rock, step, cha-cha-cha, rock, step, cha-cha-cha, sometimes it gets going fast, get every single step in there. Alright have fun! "