On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Rodney Lopez and this is my lovely partner Amelia Maldonado. We're here at Dance Manhattan Studios here in New York City, and today we're going to teach you the merengue. What we can also do is take some of those basics out of the way, and that will sort of pick up the pace. For instance, if we do a basic step 1, 2, 3, 4 and a rotating basic around the clock 1, 2, 3, 4, we can breakaway, we can bring her back, and now we can wrap the lady up. Don't take a basic, bring her back. Wrap the lady up right away, bring her back, and then go back into dance position and continue our rotation. Depending on what you want do as dancers, you can either choose to stay on the basic step while you're in a wrap position, or once you're in wrap, bring her right back out. What's great about merengue is that since there's only 2 beats to worry about at a time, you really can move a lot quicker without having to worry about doing forward and back. Many of these steps are in place, so it's a very forgiving dance. You can sort of move from one movement to the other very quickly.
