What a dance class is actually like

Nobody asks for experience at the door. In most schools you walk in, say it is your first time, and someone points you to a room. When there are several levels, the beginner one is usually the earliest of the evening.

Wear comfortable clothes and shoes that turn. You do not need dance shoes for a first class: flat, smooth soles are fine, and running shoes are not, because they grip the floor and your foot stays planted after your body has already turned.

Almost every class starts with the group in rows facing the mirror, doing the basic step with nobody in front of them. It is the part that calms people down and the part most people privately dismiss as too easy. It is the other way round: the step on your own is what later lets you think about the other person instead of your own feet.

In salsa the basic is three steps and a pause, over eight beats. In bachata it is three steps and a hip on the fourth. It gets repeated many times, and slowly, and that is the class working.

Fifteen or twenty minutes in, people pair up and the actual material starts: a turn, a change of place, a figure. Every few minutes the teacher calls a change and one of the lines moves along by one.

That rotation is what surprises newcomers most and it is the most important thing in the room. It is not about socialising: every person leads and follows differently, and dancing only with one teaches you to dance with that one. People who resist rotating take twice as long to be ready for a social.

If you came with your partner you will rotate too, and that is a good thing. It is what makes you both learn to dance with anyone instead of learning to compensate for each other.

A class talks about leading and following, which are two roles and not two genders. They usually get split the way they always have, and in almost every school you can ask to learn the other one without anybody blinking.

Both roles are equally hard, and hard at different things: leading is deciding and signalling in time, following is waiting without anticipating. Learning both makes the whole thing click sooner.

Nobody pulls you into the middle to dance alone in front of everyone. There is no exam, no level to pass, and nobody keeping score of what you get right. And you will not be the only one who arrives knowing nothing: in a beginner class, half the room is in its first month.

You will also not walk out dancing. After a first class you leave with the basic step half there and one figure you will forget on the way home. That is normal, and anyone who has been at this a while will tell you the same: what you learn in one class settles in the next one.

Many schools run the class straight into some free dancing, or hold their social later the same night. Staying half an hour is the best way to make the class worth something: it is where you try it with real music and nobody counting.

If you do not dare on day one, that is fine. But it is worth knowing it is there, because the gap between the class and the floor is the only thing that really separates the people who end up dancing from the ones who stop showing up after two months.