Can you learn to dance at home?

Part of this is yours and trains fine in your living room: the step, where your weight is, turning, hearing the music. That moves forward with videos and one square metre.

And part of it does not exist without a second person: leading and following. It is not a technique you rehearse in the air and then apply — it is a conversation, and you cannot rehearse a conversation alone.

So people who learn only at home end up with one specific, recognisable problem: they move well and cannot dance with anybody at a social.

The basic step, until it stops needing your attention. It is the dullest part and the one that pays most: while the step occupies your head, there is no room for anything else.

Weight. Almost everything that goes wrong in partner work is weight in the wrong place, and that gets fixed alone, slowly, looking at your feet.

Turns. Spinning without getting dizzy and finishing where you meant to is a matter of repetition, and it gets in the way of everyone else if you rehearse it in class.

And the music, which is what gets neglected. Putting a track on and counting to eight while doing something else — washing up, walking — is the best effort-to-result exercise in the whole thing.

Leading is proposing with your body and waiting; following is listening and answering. Both are learned by getting an answer back, and a video does not give you one.

Space, too: where the other person is, how much arm there is, when to stop. On a crowded floor that matters more than any move.

And the detail that decides whether someone dances with you again: gripping too little or too much. Nobody learns that at home because nobody tells them.

Pick one and repeat it for a week instead of watching ten. The problem with tutorials is not their quality: it is that they give you the feeling of progress while your body has repeated nothing.

Film yourself with the phone propped on a chair. It is uncomfortable and it corrects the most: what you think you are doing and what you are doing look very little alike.

And do not learn moves. A move without a lead is choreography: it looks fine in the living room and you cannot use it with anyone.

Practising at home pays enormously alongside one weekly class, because you arrive with the step already solved and spend the hour on what can only be done there.

On its own it has a ceiling, and you reach it quickly. The sign that you have hit it is feeling that you can do it and still not daring to go to a social — which is exactly the point where the other half is missing.