Bachata Dance Moves: 3 Tricks every dancer needs to learn

As a Bachata dancer, whether you are a beginner or an intermediate dancer, we have broken down some of the most important moves you need to pick up. Most dance schools teach variations of these moves so don’t worry, you will pick them up.

Body Trails

One of the most basic and fun tricks/moves to learn are body trails. In Bachata Level 1 we teach it in the 3rd class. The basic idea is the leader turns the partner, places the follower’s hand on their collar bone or stomach, and does a spin themselves. The follower trails while doing a basic to not break the connection. This can lead it advanced movements like kneck rolls with trails and more!

Dips

It takes a while and quite a bit of skill to do a dip safely in Salsa. Dips are a great way to spice up your dancing as long as you don’t overuse them. They are also great to accent a part of a song (often a drop) to make it super spicy. I love Bachata because one of the easiest dips to learn is the Twist Dip. The leader is in a closed embrace with the follower and twists their partner in a corkscrew motion (think you’re both sitting in office chairs and they descend down).

Swaying on the spot

Even though swaying seems obvious, it’s the most underappreciated trick by beginner/intermediate dancers in Bachata. As a Bachata Dance Move, it’s more of a style of movements as the song starts. A lot of Bachata songs don’t start with the beat right away and the mistake dancers make is starting to do their 8 counts. Think in high school when you were at a dance and you swayed with your partner side to side. Yep, that’s dancing and definitely needs to be picked up by every dancer. Many variations of the sway and it can get as advanced as adding syncopations, ribcage isolations and more in the first 20 seconds of the song.

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