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12 life hacks, to quickly learn how to dance from Mamita Dance

Dances

Author: Pavel Gather
Psychologist, Teacher of Salsa and Tango

Dances

Author: Pavel Pavel
Psychologist, Lecturer Salsa

on At the start, you always want to get a quick result. When it doesn’t happen, the hypothesis arises that everything takes time. After a conditionally acceptable time, humility comes to mastering pair dances, which, perhaps, is not given, and I will just do what I learned somehow.

This is the most common story of those who believe that the mere act of attending a pair dance class is enough to learn how to dance.
Absolutely not. If you want to really dance well, you have to make an effort outside of the dance class. A good teacher will definitely be needed, but the initiative should be on your side.

1. Listen to music

The most common and accessible advice that is given already in the first lessons. And it definitely works. Music creates a certain atmosphere of the dance and intuitively you want to move to it. It doesn’t matter where you listen to music — in the car, on headphones while walking or doing household chores.

An addition that will help you dance better is your active participation in the music. Sing along, dance or simply beat musical accents with any free parts of the body. In the subway, for example, it is enough to tap out bright moments with your fingers, in the car to sing along with sounds, and at home you can jump for pleasure.

2. Watch videos of good dancers

It’s complicated, but also obvious. It’s more difficult, because without recommendations from more experienced dancers, unfortunately, it’s not so easy to find a good quality video on the net (I mean not the resolution quality, but the content itself).

Meaningful video viewing is about building an understanding of HOW dancers make a particular impression on a partner or viewer. Technology is at the heart of everything. Understanding how the pros do it is a big step forward.

It is important to distinguish a show from a disco dance, a staged performance from an improvisation, a stylized dance from an authentic one, etc. Ask for recommendations and dance teachers will always throw off a couple of videos of worthy landmarks.

Tango Z. Showreel.

Online modern tango courses

Tango nuevo is the most advanced version of tango. We can quickly learn to dance from zero to a steep level.

3. Dance in salsatecas/milongas/discotheques

A very delicate moment when it is worth coming to the first party. From a technical point of view, most students in 1-3 months have a sufficient set of figures and techniques to come and dance calmly. Psychologically, the same moment can be stretched out for an indefinite time. After all, it is imperative to “not lose face”, “learn more figures” and be sure what to do in case “there is an unfamiliar movement”.

In fact, the partygoers don’t really care (except for a small layer of non-professional teachers who want to help inexperienced dancers by treating them as customers in the future). It is important to come and try dancing after a month of classes. You can only with friends or guys from your group. This will be enough to feel the adrenaline and inspiration from the dance.

4. Dance with partners or partners not of your level

The conventional wisdom that you need to practice in groups of your level does not withstand the test of experience. Perhaps now your eyes widened in surprise, and you want to meaningfully read the phrase again. Yes, you saw everything correctly: when you dance with a partner of your level, you don’t grow anywhere.

It’s important to understand that not only does it work one way and you have to dance with cooler dancers, but it works even more effectively the other way. It is no coincidence that teaching pair dances dramatically raises the level of the teacher himself. You have an endless stream of very beginner dancers.

How it works. A more experienced partner needs to be «stretched». It’s easy and obvious. With beginners, you need to take more initiative on yourself, see the general pattern of the dance more widely, turn on and insure more, try to be an example and be more careful. The quality of interaction begins to grow significantly. And wonderful partners too.

Dancing with partners of your level doesn’t make you grow. Dance with both beginners and more advanced dancers

Dominican Bachata Women’s Style Online Course

Want to learn how to hypnotize those around you with the most appetizing part of your body? On the course we will tell you all the secrets.

5. Learn to dance for a partner and for a partner

Turks and Argentines are one of the best partners in the world. In Russia, partners are highly valued. Why? The answer is simple. In Argentina and Turkey, it is not questionable for men to ask another man to lead in one piece or another and give feedback on the quality of the lead. For them, it will be a great shame to hear moralizing from a partner, or even more so to be known in the community as an insecure partner.

In Russia, due to the constant, often far-fetched, opinion that there are more women in pair dances, partners calmly get up and study their partner’s part. Such partners then grow into very cool dancers and teachers. In no case do this at parties, only in class. Here we are talking only about the learning strategy. At parties, be yourself.

6. Do not memorize the links

Always try to look deeper and understand the through principle and idea of ​​movement. Understanding what and how is done will make it possible to independently generate any sequences and chips.

Human memory is limited and there will always be a moment when something will escape and your repertoire will be limited by the size of RAM.

In Argentine tango, for example, there are seven levels of movement construction that, when mastered, will allow you to make millions of combinations. And how many dance sequences can you really remember? In rueda, more than 150 figures dance in a rare circle. It’s hard to keep more in mind.

7. Develop your body

Many years of experience in teaching couple dance shows that as soon as everyone pairs up in a class, any progress in individual style ends. But it is the individual style that distinguishes everyone at the disco: partners change, and style is always with you.

The body as the main instrument of dance must be very plastic, responsive and emotional. Surprisingly, not all pair dance schools have a general physical warm-up. It is vital to tune the body and understand how it works.

You can always train extra and concentrate more on the basic steps, as their true value is as body work. The sequence of steps is, in fact, the simplest thing that can be in pair dancing. The quality of individual performance determines the craftsmanship.

8. Try on the images of inspiring dancers

A psychological life hack for those who have already mastered the steps, but still feel that there is not enough brightness and drive. Most are terribly afraid of being someone else’s «clone». Here the action is the same as under the influence of hypnosis — the more you resist, the more you plunge into an altered state of consciousness.

With a high degree of probability, you are already dancing like someone else’s «clone». A meaningful fitting of someone else’s image is that you mentally take the image of the one who inspires you (inspiration is critical in this case) and «put on» yourself. Then you start dancing and trying to feel in general how it is to be able, for example, to be the best partner or the sexiest partner in a disco. This is much more difficult than it seems. But it works extremely efficiently.

9. Dance to offbeat music

Habitual rhythms keep you tight. Tango salon or speedy timba leave little room for experimentation and fantasy. Pattern dancing is always noticeable and is reserved for beginners.

The truly new is born outside of the usual. Look for places to experiment. If there is no place, organize self-training. The main thing is not to get carried away, because music determines the style. We bring something new to pair dances, rather than trying to change them.

Search, improvise, don’t be afraid to go beyond, develop in different directions, be inspired by music atypical for the style

10. Try your hand at basic dance directions

dances exist according to their own non-choreographic laws.

This is the deepest delusion, which has turned into a ceiling for the qualitative development of partner dances. After all, all professional dancers, for example, in salsa or bachata, build their ideas on the basic choreographic principles.

Do not think that choreography is only applicable on stage. Any meaningful movement of the body can be choreographic. In general, try classical or modern choreography. Basically, hip-hop can work too.

11. Look for battle sensations

Pair dances return us to an active position of manifestation of our body. As in the days of our ancient ancestors, we impress the members of the opposite sex by how dexterous, hardy, sexy, etc. we are. Modern laws of the jungle in the entourage of big cities.

If you look around the dance floor, it becomes clear that the majority are clearly herbivores (not in the sense of vegetarians, but in relation to those around them). I am sure that predators are always more interesting in terms of the attractiveness of the image — try to find a counterbalance among herbivores, for example, a cat woman or a lion man.

The conversation is about an internal position, not about aggressiveness. Lability and lack of control are inherent in adolescents, and not in adult self-sufficient people.

Accordingly, even a training or friendly battle gives, on the one hand, practical skills — to make a bright sequence of movements, bring an idea to a climax, show a spectacular feature, on the other hand, develops the psychological basis of the dance — self-confidence, resistance to extraneous attention, self-control and self-control in complex elements.

12. Communicate with professionals

The environment shapes the internal position. Basically, real passionaries of the dance community are ready to openly talk, discuss and support the development of dance in every possible way. Universal principles and the ideas they articulate have a much longer and more practical perspective than meets the eye.

Accept that, for example, behind the words «listen to your partner» is not only a beautiful metaphor, but also a practical skill to literally listen to your partner. At the same time, always treat every thought, even the most respected teacher, as a private opinion.

Your skill will lie in finding the scope of the idea even in conflicting opinions. Most often, the contradiction is speculative and the truth lies in the angle of perception or situationality.

Your dancing growth will stop sooner or later. This can happen at the level of three basic steps or years of experience in teaching and show performances. Regardless of your level, the suggested 12 life hacks can get you off the ground and greatly accelerate your dance growth. There is no way here without your motivation and activity. Take your dance development into your own hands.

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how we tried to learn how to dance / Habr

Hello everyone! My name is Vladislav Mosin, I am a 4th year student of the bachelor’s program “ Applied Mathematics and Informatics ” at the St. Petersburg HSE. Last summer, together with Alina Pleshkova, a master student of our faculty, I did an internship at JetBrains Research. We have been working on the Music2Dance project, the goal of which is to learn how to generate dance moves that fit the given music. This can be used, for example, when teaching dance on your own: I heard music, launched the application, and it showed movements that are harmoniously combined with this music.

Looking ahead, I will say that our results, unfortunately, turned out to be far from the best models of motion generation that currently exist. But if you are also interested in understanding this problem, I invite you under cat.

From the film “Pulp Fiction”

Existing approaches

The idea of ​​generating dance from music is quite old. Probably the most striking example is dance simulators like Dance Dance Revolution, where the player has to step on panels on the floor that glow in time with the music, and thus a kind of dance is created. Also a beautiful result in this area is the creation of dancing geometric shapes or 2D men.

There are also more serious works — the generation of 3D movements for people. Most of these approaches rely solely on deep learning. The best results for the summer of 2020 were shown by the DanceNet architecture, and we decided to take it as a baseline. Next, we will discuss their approach in more detail.

Data preprocessing

In the task of generating dance from music, there are two types of data: music and video, and both need to be preprocessed, since models cannot work with raw data. Let’s talk about the processing of each type in a little more detail.

Music: onset, beats, chroma

Probably the most common way to extract features from audio is to calculate the spectrogram or melgram — converting the sound from the amplitude domain to the frequency domain using the Fourier transform. However, in our task we are working with music, not an arbitrary audio signal, and low-level analysis is not suitable in this case. We are interested in rhythm and melody, so we will extract onset, beats and chroma (the beginning of the note, rhythm and mood of the melody).

Video: extracting the human pose

This is where things get a lot more interesting. A primitive approach — to try to predict the next frame from a video of dancing people — is doomed to failure. For example, the same dance filmed from different distances will be interpreted differently. In addition, the frame size of even a small resolution (for example, 240×240) exceeds several tens of thousands of pixels.

To get around these problems, extract the person’s pose from the video. The pose is set by a certain number of physiologically key points of the body, according to which it can be restored in its entirety. Such points include, for example, the head and pelvis, elbows and knees, feet and hands.

Key points are marked in blue

This method allows you to reduce the dimension of the input data (after all, instead of a frame with several tens of thousands of parameters, the input is a low-dimensional vector), and also allows you to concentrate more on movements.

An important feature of this method is the way in which keypoint positions are stored. For example, if you store just absolute positions in 3D space, then the problem of non-fixed bone lengths arises: the distance between the lower leg and knee or shoulder and elbow can change from frame to frame, which is not the expected behavior. To avoid such problems, the position of one point of the person, namely the middle of the pelvis, is fixed, and the position of all the others is set through the length of the bone and the angle of rotation relative to the previous point. Let me explain with an example: the position of the hand is set through the length of the radius, as well as rotation relative to the elbow.

DanceNet Architecture

DanceNet Architecture. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.03761

The DanceNet architecture consists of several main parts:

• Music encoding;

• Classification of music by style;

• Video frame encoding;

• Prediction of the next frame from previous ones and music;

• Decoding the received frame.

Let’s take a closer look at each of the parts:

1. Music coding. The pre-converted audio signal is encoded using a convolutional neural network with a Bi-LSTM layer.

2. Classification of music by style. Similar to the previous point, a convolutional neural network with a Bi-LSTM layer.

3. Frame encoding-decoding. Small two-layer convolutional network.

4. Next frame prediction. The most meaningful part of the architecture, which actually predicts the next pose from the previous ones and the music. Consists of blocks of dilated (expanded) convolutions with skip connections.

DanceNet accepts music and a set of poses as input, but it gives out not just a pose, but a parameterization of the normal distribution — the mathematical expectation and variance, from which the answer is sampled, and minus the probability of correct position is used as a loss function.

Our solution

Existing deep learning solutions have one major problem. To look realistic, you need to manually implement various kinds of restrictions. For example, the elbows and knees cannot bend in the opposite direction, with a static position of the body, the center of gravity must be between the feet, and many other restrictions. To solve this problem automatically, we propose to use reinforcement learning. The main part of this approach is the presence of an environment that will not allow the agent to make incorrect positions.

Solution architecture. Training epoch

Our solution consists of four main parts:

Dataset

One of the main issues in solving machine learning problems is the choice of dataset. For the dance generation task for the summer of 2020, there were no good quality open datasets, and the authors of the existing solutions collected them on their own. In the article, which we took as a baseline, they seriously approached the issue of data and filmed several hours of professional dances. Unfortunately, they refused to share the dataset solely for the benefit of science. Since it’s quite sad to live without a dataset, I had to come up with something. As a result, we decided to create a dataset from what was at hand: a video from YouTube and a library for detecting the position of a person VIBE.

DanceNet

In our solution, we used the original model from the article with one small change — we removed the music classification, since, firstly, our goal was to generate dance from any music, and secondly, the collected data did not contain markup and were very diverse musically.

RL model

The task of the RL model is to correct the position of the body so that it looks more realistic. At the input, the model takes the movement (for each point, the difference between the new and old positions) and the old position of the body, and outputs the corrected new position at the output.

Consider the model in detail. Reinforcement learning has two main parts: the learning algorithm and the environment.

The structure of reinforcement learning algorithms

As reinforcement learning algorithms, we decided to choose one algorithm that uses Q-Learning (our choice fell on TD3 as the most stable and expressive) and one that does not use (we settled on PPO ).

With the environment, everything turned out to be not as simple as with the algorithms. In a good way, there is no ideal ready-made environment for this task, and you need to implement it yourself. However, writing an environment that will be completely correct from the point of view of physics is a rather complicated and lengthy task that requires additional knowledge. In this regard, we decided to use the ready-made environment Humanoid , which is designed to teach the agent to move as fast as possible and not fall.

Loss function

The main task of the loss function is to take into account both the reward of the environment, which does not allow accepting unrealistic positions, and compliance with the position from the dataset.

where S is the position, S _real is the correct position, R is the environmental reward.

Model in testing phase

Solution architecture. Testing era

At the training phase, the model predicted the next position of the body from the previous and music, however, at the testing phase, only music enters the model, and there are no previous positions.