Leading Is More Than Executing Moves You Know
Updated: 5 hours ago
Sometimes I watch a couple dancing in a beginner class and recognize a familiar situation: the leader is trying to remember the steps, the follower is trying to understand where to go, and although both are making an effort, the dance is struggling to happen. The leader continues through the sequence, apparently hoping that performing their part correctly will help the other person find theirs, while the follower becomes increasingly occupied with catching up.
When I pause the exercise, I often begin by asking the leader what they are paying attention to. Are they noticing what their partner is doing, or are they mostly trying to reproduce the movements they remember? The answer helps us understand why repeating the sequence may not be enough to make the dance work.
Knowing your steps gives you something to work with, but leading requires you to understand how those steps become possible with another person. That includes recognizing where your partner is, how they are responding, and whether the movement you intended still makes sense as the interaction unfolds.
When Doing Your Part Isn’t Enough
For someone beginning to learn partner dance, there is a lot to organize. You are finding the rhythm, coordinating your body, remembering an unfamiliar movement, and trying to understand what your arms and feet are supposed to do. It is understandable that much of your attention turns inward, especially when even a relatively simple sequence still requires considerable concentration.
At the same time, your partner has their own balance, timing, and understanding of what is happening. If your attention stays entirely inside your own task, you can easily miss the information that would help the two of you move together. You may be performing the steps you learned while overlooking whether the other person has received a clear invitation or arrived in a position where the next movement becomes possible.
I see this frequently in beginner classes. A leader starts the next part of a movement before the follower has completed the previous one, the follower tries to catch up, and the leader continues because that is the sequence they remember. Repeating the exercise without addressing this relationship can simply reproduce the same misunderstanding.
What often helps is a change in what the student is trying to accomplish. Instead of beginning with the intention to complete the sequence, I ask them to begin by finding their partner: noticing how the other person is moving and establishing a simple coordination before introducing more possibilities. This can happen through the basic movement itself, as they discover a shared rhythm and become more aware of each other.
Sometimes a small adjustment is enough to change the experience. The leader allows a little more time, makes a movement smaller, or recognizes where the partner actually is before proposing a new direction. There are moments when this understanding clicks and the dance improves almost immediately, even though neither person has learned an additional step.
This is something I work on from the beginning in my weekly forró classes in New York. Learning to lead includes learning to notice whether a movement is becoming shared, so that connection develops alongside the steps rather than being treated as something to address after the student has accumulated a larger repertoire.
More Moves Can Bring the Same Problem Back
Recently, I had a conversation with a student who has been studying with me for more than a year. He is intelligent, curious, and dedicated, understands movements relatively quickly, and enjoys experimenting with new possibilities. His enthusiasm makes him an engaged student, always interested in exploring what else he might be able to do.
But I have also noticed, both in class and at social events, that he sometimes becomes absorbed in his own thinking. His attention seems occupied with remembering movements, finding combinations, and deciding what to do next, while the person dancing with him is left trying to follow the result of that internal process.
In one recent class, he was connecting several movements while his partner was having difficulty following the sequence. What caught my attention was that this difficulty did not seem to influence his choices: he continued with what he was trying to do instead of taking a moment to reconnect and adjust the dance they were actually having.
I asked him, in essence, whether he was thinking about executing the movements he knew or about guiding the person he was dancing with and adapting to their responses. He recognized the distinction immediately and acknowledged that his attention had been on performing the movements.
I appreciated his honesty because this is a familiar habit, and one that can be difficult to recognize from inside the dance. For a beginner, attention may be consumed by the effort of coordinating a few steps; later, it can be consumed by the effort of organizing a much larger repertoire. In both situations, the partner can remain outside the decision-making process, even as the leader becomes more capable of performing movements.
Improvising a Sequence Is Only Part of Leading
This is where the relationship between choreography and improvisation becomes interesting. A leader may be choosing every movement spontaneously and still be relatively unresponsive to the person in front of them, because the sequence is being invented almost entirely inside their own head. There may be freedom in the order of the movements while their execution remains attached to a predetermined expectation.
Practicing sequences has value because it helps us understand movement and become familiar with possibilities. But when we bring those sequences into social dancing, we need to remain available to what actually happens between the two people involved. A familiar movement may take a little longer with this partner, finish somewhere slightly different, or produce a response that suggests another continuation.
Improvisation also happens through these changes in the realization of a movement. We may adjust its size, allow more time, reshape its direction, or let go of the continuation we originally imagined. The ability to create a new combination matters, but so does the ability to recognize when a combination needs to change.
This is closely related to what I explore in Learning Forró as a Dance Language—Beyond Steps and Patterns. Familiarity with vocabulary gives us possibilities, while fluency allows us to use those possibilities in response to a conversation that is still unfolding.
Pacing and Leading: Finding a Shared Starting Point
Years ago, outside the dance world, I came across an idea called “pacing and leading.” The expression is used in neuro-linguistic programming to describe accompanying aspects of another person’s current experience before attempting to introduce a change. I am borrowing the idea here as a way of thinking about dance, particularly the importance of the starting point from which we try to lead.
If I am already committed to a particular speed, direction, and way of moving, my partner has to find a way to join me. But I can also begin by noticing how they are moving, how much time they are taking, and what kind of momentum already exists between us. From there, I can find a shared starting point and suggest a direction that develops from something we are already doing together.
This does not require copying everything the other person does or giving up the initiative to lead. It requires allowing their movement to participate in how I lead, so that my proposal takes into account the person receiving it. There is a physical difference between trying to make someone fit a movement and discovering how that movement can develop from the interaction already taking place.
When I use the word “energy” in this context, I am thinking about things we can perceive through movement and contact: the momentum of a turn, the pace of a weight transfer, or the amount of movement a partner brings into the embrace. These qualities give me information about how to propose a continuation without constantly interrupting or overriding what is happening.
This process continues throughout the dance, because every proposal produces a response that becomes part of the next situation. Pacing and leading, as I bring the idea into dance, becomes an ongoing process of finding each other again and allowing a shared movement to develop from that meeting.
A Response Can Change More Than the Next Step
When I talk about adapting to a follower, I do not mean only choosing easier movements for someone with less experience. Adaptation also happens with highly experienced dancers, whose movement may offer a musical idea, a different timing, or a way of completing a turn that opens an unexpected possibility.
Their response can enrich what I had imagined, including the quality of the movement itself. A familiar sequence may acquire a different character because of how this person moves, hears the music, or uses their body. This is part of what interests me in Corporeality in Partner Dance: the encounter between two bodies can reveal possibilities that neither person would discover in quite the same way alone.
Even when something does not work, I do not necessarily need to identify the cause immediately. Perhaps my proposal was unclear, perhaps we understood the timing differently, or perhaps we simply lost coordination for a moment. Whatever the explanation, I still need to recognize where we are now and make a choice that belongs to that situation.
The continuation I imagined may no longer be available, while another one may have become possible. Allowing this information to influence the dance is part of the responsibility of leading, and it also creates room for the follower to participate beyond successfully reproducing an expected response.
For a broader reflection on how this flexibility develops through the structure and practice of forró, I explore the subject in Why Adaptability Matters in Social Dancing.
When the Dance Stops Working, Make Room to Reconnect
One of the most useful things a leader can learn is to recognize when continuing a sequence is making the interaction more difficult. The impulse is often to keep going because you know what comes next, and reaching that next movement can feel like the way to recover. Meanwhile, the person dancing with you may still be trying to understand what happened earlier.
At that moment, a simpler proposal can give both of you room to find a shared rhythm again. You can stay with something familiar, notice the response, and rebuild from there, without treating the completion of a combination as an obligation. Recovering a comfortable coordination may be the most useful contribution you can make to the dance.
This is worth practicing deliberately. During a dance, notice whether your partner’s responses are changing your choices, and whether you can recognize a moment of uncertainty before adding another movement. As you become more comfortable staying with familiar material, you may find more room to perceive what the other person is offering and respond without rushing to fill every moment.
The music can help organize that process too. A shared pulse or a familiar phrase can provide a place to settle and reconnect, allowing movement choices to develop from something both partners can hear. I explore that relationship further in Musicality in Dance—Beyond Steps and Choreography.
I keep returning to the question I asked my student because it applies to leaders at many stages of learning: are you thinking about executing the movements you know, or about guiding the person you are dancing with? The movements you have learned give you valuable possibilities, but leading requires you to discover how those possibilities can take shape with this particular person.
The beginner who finds a shared rhythm before continuing and the more experienced student who allows a response to change the next movement are developing the same capacity. They are learning to make choices from within the interaction, so that the dance becomes something both people help bring into existence.
Continue Reading
If you would like to bring this reflection into other aspects of your practice, 7 Essential Tips to Lead Better in Forró explores movement choices, body language, comfort, and responsiveness in a broader practical guide.
The question of what we are trying to create with those skills leads to Do You Use Connection to Dance, or Dance to Create Connection?, where I reflect on the place another person occupies in the dance we want to have.
That reflection is also part of the personal journey I share in I Am a Forró Social Dancer. Let Me Tell You Why., about how the experience of dancing with people gradually became the center of my relationship with dance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rafael Piccolotto de Lima is the Founder and Educational Director of Forró New York, as well as a Latin Grammy-nominated composer, arranger, and music director.
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