Best Practices For Your Wedding Dance

Best_Practices_Wedding_Dance You've seen it before.

You're watching your favorite Bloopers Show, and out walks the bride and groom.

Oh no.

Like controversial talk shows, or monster truck rallies - you know disaster is about to strike, and yet, you have to watch. Like a moth to a flame, you watch as a hapless newlywed splits their pants, falls over, or some combination of both.

Was that their plan? Hopefully not.

Can it be avoided? Absolutely.

Best Practices for Your Wedding Dance

Follow these steps to avoid preventable Wedding Dance mistakes

1. Start Early

You would never wait until the last minute when it comes to:

Your wedding party
Your invitations
Your venue
Your dress

So, if your vision goes beyond swaying side-to-side, allow time for the teachers to deliver the information to your muscle memory. Your short term memory will be working overtime already with placecards and playlists - so start early and give yourself a smooth first dance.

2. Dance During Your Reception

Imagine doing your wedding dance and it’s a flawless reenactment of the Mambo in the final scene of Dirty Dancing (you’re a fan). After the second standing ovation you take your seats, eat cake, and when your fans ask to see you dance again you:

Sway side to side like you did in High School
Decline the invitation and eat cake
Decline the invitation and hit the bar

FRAUD ALERT! Dancing an incredible first dance suggests that you know how to dance. Sitting out because you only focused on one incredible performance reveals that you only know a dance.

3. Get the Family involved

It’s fun to surprise a bunch of people on your wedding day to show them that you know how to dance now. But once that wears off, they are, sort of, left there just watching you have a great time. As great as that is, the only thing cooler than watching you dance and have fun… is for them to dance and have fun with you.

RULE: Get your parents, wedding party, and siblings some dance lessons.

4. Done in 90 Seconds -

The top professionals in the world don’t go beyond 90 seconds when they are performing. Not because they can’t, but that’s the threshold for the audience’s attention. If 90 seconds isn’t enough, we suggest a second dance performance. Not the worst thing in the world.

New song + New 90 + New Outfits = Wedding Reception Gold

5. The Right Surpises

Let's take a look at the difference between the two types of wedding dance surprises:

The Right Surprise	The Wrong Surprise
You thought we couldn't dance, but SURPRISE! We can.	"You thought we took dance lessons, but SURPRISE, we didn't."
At the end of our routine, we are going to SURPRISE the audience with a dip our teacher taught us.	At the end of the routine, I'm going to surprise my spouse with a dip I saw on TV.
They're going to think we are doing a Waltz, and then SURPRISE! it turns into a Cha-Cha by Pitbull.	"We are going to surprise the audience with a 5 minute re-enactment of our slow dancing from high school. Bump and Grind anyone?"

6. Don’t Ever Do This

Learning to dance for your wedding is, literally, the only stress reducing wedding planning activity. In fact, we would say that learning to dance is NOT a wedding planning activity, but instead, a marriage planning activity. Learning to dance is a date night. You take some lessons, you learn how to dance, you get closer. So how can you go wrong, right?

If you try to do it on your own it has the opposite effect.

From time to time, an aspiring dance couple will take a few lessons, and then the unthinkable happens: one of them, who took a dance class in college, decides to become the teacher. The real lessons taper off, and the "new teacher" starts teaching their fiance in their living room.

This is just the "Wedding-Plans-Version" of:

Your mom offering to make you her own version of a Big Mac, instead of taking you to McDonald’s
Having your brother design your company’s website
Your Dad turning the sprinklers on and trying to convince you and your brother that it’s a real waterpark.

So, even if you were a dance major, a finalist on a dance TV show, or you have every episode of Dancing With the Stars on your DVR - leave the teaching to the teachers.

The Most Important Detail

Learning to dance together is one of the few things that can last after your wedding day. When the wedding cake has been eaten, the DJ has been paid, and the guests have gone home - you'll still have dancing.

As great as that is, the real question becomess: Why are you still waiting to get started?