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Modern Ballroom Dancing: All the Steps You Need to Get You Dancing |
Author: Victor Sylvester
Published: 2005-05-01 |
List price: $13.00
Our price: $10.40
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Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: December 04th, 2008 03:46:54 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Great For International Style
First, this book on international style will never replace a teacher. If you want to learn international style, give yourself about a year with a private teacher. If you're a couple, figure 2 years. It is impossible to learn to dance from a book. Footsteps show alignment only. Books do not teach technique, and international style is all about technique. If you want to learn to dance socially, take private ballroom dance lessons with a good studio. This book is not for you.
A piece of advice, Forget about group lessons. No one learns to dance in a group.
This book is very clear and written for someone who knows how to dance.
Last, you need to learn amalgamations, i.e., continuity. Learning one step at a time doesn't work. This book will tell you which figure precedes or follows a given figure.
 A ballroom teacher's manual with pictures
The Victor Silvester book is really a ballroom teacher's manual with pictures, and the reader's undersanding is really proportional to his prior experience. The pictures, and the steps figures don't really do much to explain the steps themselves, and though the book covers ballroom steps for all levels (from beginner to gold), it doesn't really tell you which one is which.
Another thing, even though this book covers both ballroom and latin, it is really a ballroom book. The latin steps are incomplete (it only covers the latin bronze syllabus), and does not explain important concepts such as cuban motion and samba bounce.
Unlike the other manuals, the Victor Silvester book does cover the basic steps for Viennese Waltz and disco. However, if the reader is already at the level that the material in this book becomes useful, he probably does not need them.
My experience with ballroom dancing manuals has been, that one really does need a qualified instructor to demonstrate the steps, techniques, and all the basics of movement, posture and connections. Only then, would one benefit from the manual. It is not meant for the novice (or the inexperienced) as a substitute for lessons. I have seen some of my friends trying to learn straight from the book, and the results were much less than desirable.
PS: I have both the Victor Silvester book and Alex Moore's ISTD ballroom manual. I personally find the ISTD manual more compact, and a lot better organized. It is a little more expensive than Silvester, and it also has no pictures, but for me it is worth it.
The Rich Get Richer
MODERN BALLROOM DANCING has been valuable to me in improving my skills in those dances with which I was already familiar. The usefulness seemed to have been in direct proportion to what I knew before reading the book. It has not been very helpful in learning new dances.The text includes several dazzling photos of competitive dancers in action.
A very good reference
This text is a very good reference for International style dancing. It is very complete and conforms fairly well to the syllabus. As stated by other reviewers, if you're a beginner its probably too much, but if you have a good teacher nearby to help explain some of the ambiguities you can learn a lot on your own from it. Definitely not a book that you can just pick up and start dancing, it requires some intellectual effort to digest, but once you've done that you'll have a clear and systematic conceptualization and schema for dancing that few teachers can impart. My only major complaint: an excess of glossy pictures from dancing competitions. This book is really most helpful for the standard dances (which is OK with me since that's my style, not latin.)
A very good buy!
I purchased this book to compliment my dance instruction. Being that I take lessons in Japan, I needed a book, in English, which would reinforce and further explain what was being taught to me in class. I have found it a very useful book. However, this is not a book for a beginning dancer! The explanations and footwork patterns are detailed, but if you have no experience with ballroom dancing, the figures and explanations will mean very little to you. Some of the more complicated steps do not have foot diagrams, which would have been helpful. All and all, an excellent book!
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