Last Thursday, Catrine and I started our weekly series at the Richmond YMCA in San Francisco. Over the years we've found that most teachers emphasize figures and steps, often overlooking the essential elements of the dance. Plus, they don't provide the basic tools that help students to learn more effectively.

So, for our 1st class we started with rhythmic walking - that's not unusual, but rather than jumping right into a series of steps (figures), we worked on building connection.

Students provided feedback like "wow, we really need to follow!" and "walking is not as simple as it looks!" This is precisely our point - if you glance over these fundamentals, you're building the rest of your house on foundation of sand!