Customer Reviews

Swing Dancing with Teresa Mason [VHS]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I would recommend this video to any beginner in swing. You can see both wonderful performance and thoughtful instruction. You can hit the dance floor in an hour, and I mean it... I have learned more from this tape than from attending swing classes for two months.

On the up side, she and her partner are an excellent, fluid dancers. On the down side, she has this flirtacious thing going that I find annoying and I find the Webb's tapes more instructional (you can also learn ~3 times as many steps for the same price). Ms. Mason and her partner's are more fluid dancers than the Webbs's -- she's incredibly smooth -- but the Webbs are better teachers.

These instructions are nearly impossible to follow - especially the women's steps. The tape starts out with slow, simple steps, but pretty soon, they start stringing together complicated series of steps without demonstrating the women's steps in slow motion. Even when they demonstrate the Dallas Side Pass, (where the man twirls the woman around twice in less time than it takes to say "one-Mississippi") they slowly show the men's steps, complete with close-ups of the feet, and then show the pair dancing together at full speed, with no demonstration of the women's steps. This is how *all* the steps are demonstrated beyond the first basic steps. They must think that men need extra help with dance steps and that women need no help at all! But even the men's instructions are too fast to follow, as my husband found.

I agree with the other reviewers that the instructors are great dancers but poor instructors. The choice of editing is confusing. Rather than big band or rock-a-billy, the steps are done to cheap synthesizer cowboy music. To say it was not helpful at all would not be correct or fair. It did help, but I am now looking for tape that will serve us better.