East Bay Swing

If I lived in the East Bay rather than SF, I would be taking classes from Stacey and Vaughn as often as possible. They are both really friendly and know how to motivate you to learn the steps and get out there and dance. Their lessons are reasonably priced and at a convenient location. One thing I like about Stacey and Vaughn’s classes that I haven’t experienced in other classes is that they have the leads and follows switch roles so you can learn both ways to dance. All in all, highly recommended!

The top five things I like about swing dance classes with Stacey and Vaughn:
1. Friendly staff. They do this for fun, not profit.
2. Less talk, more dancing (because practice makes perfect, but sermons are boring).
3. The price is right.
4. The room has huge mirrors on three walls, so I can watch myself improve.
5. They allow you to keep dancing after class is over (see item #1).
The bottom line: this is a very good way to learn to dance.

I started taking their class on a whim, with no dance experience at all, but Stacey and Vaughn got me hooked on Lindy and Balboa…
They’re both good dancers, good teachers, and very nice people, so their class is a lot of fun. They do a great job of keeping things interesting and just challenging enough without being intimidating, and vary the pace depending on the mix of students’ levels each week or month. It helps that the classes are usually pretty small, so they can give people individually focused help; I also like that they tend to spend some class time dancing in the rotation with all of the students, because sometimes something that seems confusing in words makes more sense when you’re actually doing the steps with someone. They have students switch roles during class, so that everyone learns to both lead and follow, which is hard at first, but I find that having both perspectives does really help you learn the dance better.
Aside from all of those details, one of my favorite things about their class is that we spend a lot of time actually dancing. They play a lot of music during class, and usually after spending some time teaching a particular step they’ll have us dance through a song or two to practice it in context, by calling a sequence based on the steps we’ve learned so far. And often at the end of class they’ll put on a few songs so we can just dance.
Great class, and my new favorite way to spend a Friday evening…