Who are we?

Jon and Sharon Bott. I am a programmer/multimedia developer and she is a modern dancer.  Sharon and I have been dancing socially in swing for the last 4 years or so. Before that I was a ballroom dancer, but left it for swing. Now I am trying to find an even level between the too.

Why this website?

I started this website for two, ... no three reasons.

1) I wanted to do some more work for my resume. I do a lot of Macromedia Director Flash training and educational software. And I wanted to push Director to it's limits.

2) I couldn't find any good dance sites (aside from www.ballroomdancers.com, and I haven't seen many new clips there for a long time) where you can actually learn on the web (we will be producing a dvd with all the content later on too).

3)Sharon stop reading here ... I wanted a digital Camera, and this convinced my wife of it :).

Now after a year of doing this I can honestly say it is mostly a service to the community at large.  We put tons of time into this site, and I am hoping that people are able to gain a lot from here.

The future goals of the website

- To have all the levels of the ballroom syllabus on the web

- To constantly be growing in swing moves and social dance moves.

There are some really good dancers out there, and this can be a great resource to mix the scenes for those less fortunate souls of us who don't go to exchanges every week.

- To show the different styles of swing dances (Savoy, Dean Collins, Smooth), the different Shags (the dance I say), and the differences between social ballroom and international (competition ballroom)

-To have a DVD produced with all these steps and things on it.

Is this site better than private lessons?

I wouldn't say better. I think this site should really partner dance lessons, if you are into dance a lot. The reason for this is this: Most beginners want to know moves. Heck, I want to know moves :). But most technique is over looked in lessons where you want to learn a lot of moves. We obviously don't know how your own dancing is, and we can only give you general pointers. A private instructor can give you the stuff that can fix problems you might have, and point out stuff that they have learned. We are not by any means the end all of dance, we are just here to give you ideas, and get you doing the steps. We'll leave the doing the steps well up to you and how you choose to go about it. We of course will do our best to explain how we go about executing the steps, but there are other styles and ways of doing things.  We will be providing an instructor section with information of professional instructors, and clips of them, so that you can take private lessons with them.  Be sure to choose who you like the look of their dancing, because whoever you take your technique lessons from, you will look like them.

What if we want to dance West Coast, Dean Collins Style, and Savoy Style all really good.

It has been in our experience that either you are good at one of these, or mediocre at all of them. West coast is very different from "Hollywood" in that you have much more "groove time", and the rhythms are generally slower.  As well as there is a sharpness to the turns.  Think sexy.  Savoy, has a more crouched look to it, almost a hip hop feel.  Think cool. The way sharon and I dance is more upright, smooth, and not very flashy.  Think high-nosed <grin>.  There are a lot of different looks, and you will enjoy dancing more if you have a definite style.  None are right or wrong, but you will find learning easier if you have a base style to go back to.