Boston Mobile Dance Studio

If you are a TRUE beginner… Like with dance moves not even a mother could love, look elsewhere. Slightly experienced dancers, you will have a great time and I highly encourage you to take this class. I have taken exactly two «BEGINNER hip hop» dance classes with BMDS at the Cambridge Dance Complex. The instructor, Carl has to be the absolute nicest guy on the planet and he really knows his dance. He is funny, friendly, and energetic. I don’t intend to hurt their business at all with my low rating, but I did have an exceptionally hard time in their «beginner» class, and if there is anybody in the world that is a BEGINNER, I’d like to think I fit the bill. This «beginner» class I feel is not really for beginners and was extremely intimidating and scary for a true beginner like myself.
I’ve always wished I could dance, but I didn’t have the opportunity to learn any style of dance as a child: no ballet, no jazz, no tap, nada. When it comes to dance, I am the epitome of the term BEGINNER. I have two left feet and no rhythm. Yet, I’ve always wanted to know how to dance and love music.
I reluctantly signed up for this beginner class when a close friend of mine who has been dancing ballet since she was 4 years old and now teaches Zumba invited me to come along. When I arrived a bit early for my first class, the previous class was just finishing up. My friend was very reassuring. The first class got off to a very fast start. The warm-​up was pretty fast paced, lots of technical moves and such, but I decided that if I could just move in the general direction of everybody else, I’d blend in enough to survive the hour or so class. Then, we began learning a set of choreography to Missy Elliot’s «Where They From,» a very fast paced hip hop song. It became evident quite quickly that I was NOT at all in a class full of beginners, but instead was in a class filled with fairly seasoned dance veterans who are taking this class in their free time (sorry friend who invited me, that means you too!). For someone like me, this is super intimidating!!!
But, at any rate, it’s still a beginner class, right? Hopefully it would still move at a beginner pace, right? Eh… not really. The class not only moves very quickly, but also includes lots of confusing (for a beginner like me) combinations. He doesn’t really count much «5−6−7−8, and 1−2−3−4…» but does more of like a «dah-​dah-​dah-​dah» type of sound which doesn’t really register much for me. My friend, who basically falls into the «seasoned dancer doing this for fun» category even said that the moves he was showing us «isolations, combinations, insert more fancy dance lingo here» were pretty hard even for her. In her words, «isolations should be a class all to themselves.» I’m not exactly sure what that means… but to me it sounds like not so beginner stuff we were doing.
I’m not 100% positive, but it seems like the instructor kind of makes the choreography up as he goes. Again, I’m not sure, but there are times throughout when he is teaching the next add-​on moves and forgets a few steps which means he then has to double back and correct himself. For a beginner, it’s already hard enough to learn the first time around, and it becomes frighteningly harder to un-​learn and re-​learn on a moment’s notice.
I found myself feeling constantly behind the pace of everyone else, and who am I to ask 95% of the so-​called beginner class to slow down and wait just for me? By my second class, I was feeling even more discouraged. I stopped to get some water and a woman who was not taking the class, but just sitting off to the side staring at everyone with a grim look on her face said something rude to me when I stepped past her to get to my water bottle she was sitting next to. Maybe this got in my head on top of already feeling so lost and discouraged up to this point. I couldn’t take it anymore and halfway through I dashed out of the classroom in tears, probably never to return again.
There are other classes I have taken (art, fitness) where they actually «bump» the students who are already advanced enough to the next level up, like they must graduate to the intermediate or advanced levels. This would help lower the intimidation factor for newbies like me who see «beginner» and help pace the instruction for real beginners. BMDS doesn’t seem to offer this, though and has all but crushed my dance hopes and dreams.
Since clearly I’m not even talented enough to qualify as a beginner, is there a level below that for non-​dancers like me? Is there somewhere I can go to learn the absolute most fundamental basics of dance? Maybe I need a «You’re a lost cause, just chop your legs off because there is no chance for you» level class. I literally left this class in tears and feeling hopeless.
Again, *I* had a bad experience, because of my own fear/​embarrassment/​inexperience. If you pick up choreography easily, this class is guaranteed fun.