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Susie’s Notebook: Floorcraft

Floorcraft & Dancing Etiquette

© 2003 Gert-Jan & Susie Rotscheid

Floorcraft and etiquette are a part of how you move across the floor. We need to be
especially careful when dancing the smooth dances, since there is more floor movement and
where you generally move in a counter clockwise direction in the flow of the dance. This
direction is called Line of Dance, abbreviated LOD.

As you progress, you need to think of yourself as moving on a sort of imaginary road around
the perimeter of the floor. Your object is to avoid stopping or moving against the flow of traffic
as you dance. You should not stop on this dancing road; if you need to stop, for instance, to
tie your shoe, or to fix something, you should move off to the side. Another responsibility of
each dance couple is not to bump into someone who has stopped, yet not yet moved off to
the side. This requires good knowledge of the figures you are dancing. Having a good
knowledge of the figures will help you change the size, direction and speed of your steps so
you can guide your partner correctly around the other dancers.

One of your goals on the dance floor should be to dance with “zero bumps”. Especially when
learning a new figure or a new sequence, sometimes we forget that we still need to consider
the social aspects of dancing. We should be careful not to fall into the category of dancer
who no matter what will use “their space”, pushing, bumping and moving all the other
dancers out of their way. Remember that round dancing is social dancing not combat
dancing – we need to keep that in mind as we whirl around the floor.

If possible, we should try and keep at least about 1 meter of space between ourselves and
the next dancing couple. Sometimes on a crowed floor this is very difficult. Good floorcraft
and etiquette include not bumping into other dancers and the ability to continue to dance
when “boxed in”. But sometimes, even if we are careful, we will bump into someone else. If
for whatever reason you do bump into another dancer, remember to apologize for this.