What do you typically wear? Where I dance it gets really hot, so athletic clothes feel like a good idea, but nobody else wears them. It's rare to even see women in shorts.

I worry about anything 2 piece because all of the arms above head exposes lower back, which I'm sorta self conscious about

Only the older generation seems to wear dresses

I've settled on jumpsuits, which I love, but the thought process got me curious about what other people wear

Hello, have any fellow westies had bunion surgery? I am follow who dances in advanced and am seriously considering getting it done. I'm hesitant bc I don't want it to affect my dancing.

If you've had it done, how was your experience post surgery? Were you able to execute moves properly? Go on relevé? Have good range of motion and foot articulation?

The sub isn't super active so some might say it doesn't matter but I find it annoying that seemingly every other day there is a new post that instead of talking about dancing is "Look at this cool app/website I made."

I don't know what it is about WCS that seems to invite this but I don't need a catalog of dance moves, 3 different apps to track my practices, a database of all the dance scene venues, etc because those all already exist in some other form.

I'm looking for the sub to come together and make a decision on this on whether they are outright banned or just limited to a pinned post at the top.

Edit: I made a typo in the post title and I can't edit it.

Hi everyone!

I’ve been working on WestieHub.dance for a while, to help dancers track events, look up points, and plan trips.

I just launched a new feature Communities Map to help easily find local West Coast Swing studios and schools worldwide.

I don't have a lot of data by myself (and this is why I'm making it) so I really need your help to fill it with accurate data.

Please suggest your favorite local WCS schools, studios, or weekly classes! You can do this in two easy ways:

1. Submit directly on the site: Go to westiehub.dance/communities and drop the details there.
2. Comment below: Just leave a comment with the City/State/Country, the Name of the school/class, and a link to their website or active social page.

Please drop a comment here once you've submitted or suggested a spot so I can make sure it gets added immediately!

Thank you so much for helping make our dance community more accessible to everyone! Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas for the map feature 🙏🙏

I've danced WCS socially for years, just for fun — no competition.

Recently I've noticed something interesting. A few follows I've danced with have introduced tango-like leg movements when I've stopped progression or moved us off the normal WCS track.

I wasn't specifically leading a tango pattern; I gave them the space and they chose to do something with it.

I'm curious: Are other WCS social dancers seeing tango movement or tango influence showing up in their dances? Is this fairly common, or am I just running into a few follows who happen to have tango backgrounds?

You can get a complete picture of the WSDC registry by calling the API 28,500 times, once for every dancer. But when you’ve done that once, the only way to update that is to do the whole thing again, for every single dancer. I'd rather not do that to their server if it's not necessary. Does anyone know of an easy way to just get data for dancers where there’s been some change?

In about 6 weeks I'll be at my first festival and I'm wondering if there's any way to prepare for it. My main focus will be participating in workshops (and also social dancing). There are three different workshop levels (2, 3 and 4). The description of the levels is pretty non-descriptive. There are specific competition levels required or an audition. Since I haven't done any competitions, I'll need to audition.

Now I'm wondering

- are these levels somewhat universal?

- how exactly does an audition work?

- what are they looking for in this audition?

- are there ways to specifically prepare for this audition?

If I'm ending up in level 2, so be it, but I think it would be cool to make level 3 or 4 to be able to choose between different workshops.

Hi everyone!

Does anybody have any recommendation for shoe this size, that could work with WCS? I wonder if anyone knows a brand or model which goes this big, and has experience dancing in them (as well as experience ordering from the brand/store).

Any recommendations or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated!

I am having whatever the dance version of a midlife crisis is when it dawned on me that I've been taking group lessons for a year and I still feel like a total beginner.

I am arguably the weakest follow in my level 2 class, and at this point, I've been there longer than a good chunk of them. My teacher is the sweetest person ever but a lot of time is spent correcting: my anticipation, back activation, axis adherence*, arm prep, (over) tense connection.

Our class is very pattern forward; therefore, I know how to do about 15 patterns but I cannot do any of them as well as the other students. I feel like I may be holding the class back and I may have to accept I'm not a good dancer. I thought maybe I was in my head but then I went social dancing and a (trying to be nice) stranger pointed out that I was counting the beat to sixes instead of eights (true, I never knew otherwise). Then, he said that as a newbie the world is my oyster, I did not have the heart to tell him I've been practicing for a year and have been to 5? social dances.

*If anyone has tips, I have not found one answer to how I stop free spinning at a slight diagonal.

I’ve been in novice almost 3 years now and I’m ready to take things seriously and try everything I can to get out!

I go to weekly classes, weekly socials, take private lessons, go to conventions and still haven’t made finals. I’ve probably been to about 10 conventions total. I think I have to practice solo daily including in front of a mirror…I feel anxious and self conscious about it but I would love to get out of novice so I’m committed to facing my body shame!!!

I have bad ADHD and practicing on my own isn’t great so I’m down to pay for an online program to help me
have structure to practice every day on my own. Which programs are best for novice followers stuck in novice?? Would love to hear success stories! Feeling pretty down about myself. Thank you all!!!!

Hi all. I've been working on a side project called Westie Wiki (westie.wiki) and it's at the point where it's more useful with more people in it, so I wanted to share it here.

The idea: every WCS pattern gets a page with its names and aliases, a description, difficulty, and timestamped YouTube clips of real dancers at real events. Full dances are mapped move by move, so you can just to specific moves. You can also play segments of the video on loop and slowed down.

A few things worth knowing before you look:

• Anyone can browse; editing takes a free account. Every edit is recorded Wikipedia-style, with history, diffs, and restore, so you can't really break anything.
• Videos stay on YouTube. We only link clips uploaded by the dancers themselves or the event, or shared with the dancer's explicit permission.
• The code is open source at github.com/bendichter/westie-wiki.

I recorded a 6-minute walkthrough if you'd rather watch than click around.

It's early and the content is thin. If a move you know is missing or described in a way that doesn't match how your scene dances it, that's exactly the kind of edit the site exists for. And if something is broken or confusing, I'd genuinely like to hear it, either in the comments or as a GitHub issue.

EDIT: Original post seems to have been deleted.

I am sharing this to increase distribution. I don't have any firsthand knowledge about what happened, but Atomic is a very important studio for West Coast Swing in southern CA so it might be relevant for dancers here as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SwingDancing/comments/1vq2ynj/i_was_sexually_abused_by_a_staff_member_at_atomic/

Hi all, I'll be visiting London from August 22-26, and I'd love to hit up a local social dance while I'm there!

I poked around online and found some classes listed at https://wcs.london/ but it seems there's only one proper social dance, Saturday Aug 22 the W1 Swing @ Holborn Freestyle by Swing Academy.

For those who attend regularly, is it a popular social? Also, are the one hour mini socials after the weekly classes a true social dance or more like a practice session?

Thanks so much!

Could you tell me the typical lead to follow ratio for west coast swing socials in your area? I love another dance style, but the ratio is probably 1 lead to 3 follows, and I’d love to find a style that’s more even. Also, is it the culture to dance one song and then (usually) change partners? Or do partners dance 3-4 songs in a row before switching?

My kid is interested in West Coast swing. She is however, 17 years old and I want her to have a group that is at least a little closer to her own age. Does anyone know of relatively age-appropriate West Coast swing groups in Southern California?

Hi all, I'm looking for community engagement and questions about the structure and nature of West Coast competition, that I can hopefully answer for you. I have built a tool and a dataset that allows for deep exploration of the scene across hundreds of events and over many years. Intentionally keeping that a bit vague.

But! I'd love to hear your questions, so that I both can hopefully answer them but also get some ideas of what people want to know about, to give me some direction on how to improve it. And no, this won't ever become an app, you won't be able to sign up for it, and I'm not trying to sell you anything.

Some examples of the kinds of questions I can answer:

1. What's the median number of events someone competes at before making finals?

2. What are the easiest and hardest events in the US? In Europe?

3. Is competition easier or harder for follows than it is for leads?

4. Does having more judges at a competition result in more or less accurate judging? Are some judges more accurate than others?

5. Which division is the hardest to get out of? The easiest?

6. Is it true that the easiest way to earn points is to go to small events?

7. Do people who compete in Strictly do better in Jack & Jills? What about ProAm?

And some examples of the kinds of questions I can't answer:

1. Why didn't I make finals at my last event?

2. Why do judges tell me to roll through my feet when I know I already am?

3. How do I make the WCS community realize that social dancing is more important than competition?

4. What do I do to keep my lead from pulling me off time?

Hopefully by example there's some distinguishing qualities between what I can and can't answer.

Look forward to your questions!

Edit: I have seen questions posted as of about ~ 2 PM EST 8/14, and will try to get back to y'all this weekend with answers and stats!

Edit 2: Now that I am on vacation, starting to answer questions!

So as the title says, I am coming back to West Coast swing after doing dancing in general for some time and not taking a break. I know I got some work to do coming back especially since I was a newcomer level when I stopped dancing 8 months ago. But what would be some things to consider that would be helpful coming back. I am changing dancing community’s where I am going to take group classes As I felt then previous community was very cliq/levl driven . I just want to get back to a dance I love and if there is other stuff I want to do il find out later. Any feedback would be helpful

I prefer social dancing over workshops and comps.

I know that TAP limits the number of participants to a relatively small level, perhaps 400? Normally, I avoid smaller events because social dancing tends to thin out around 2-3am. However there are very notable exceptions to that rule of thumb.

Is the floor still relatively packed with people at 4am on Friday and Saturday for example?

I'm trying to work on my movement skills, and in the past line dances have stuck out as a great way to improve it for WCS. I'm far from event centres so my thinking is that learning line dances on my own will help my personal movement skills. Is there a good channel or place to learn new line dances online? Also what are some of the best ones to try and learn?

Hey all! I’m curious if anyone has experience coming back to WCS following a lumbar spinal fusion. How long were you out? Did you do anything to ease back in? I’ve been dancing about 6 months and know I’ll be itching to get back, but will of course talk to my surgeon and PT before I do anything. But was curious if anyone had experience to share.

Edit: thanks so much for the contributions. So much to digest now

Hi all! 👋

I’m looking for recommendations for my 2027 Europe tour!

Ideally, I’d love to do 2–3 events back-to-back, preferably smaller events, although I’m open to a mix. I’m hoping to keep travel between events fairly easy and minimal — bonus points if they’re well connected by train! 🚆

I’m especially looking for events with high-quality, well-levelled workshops, great dancing, and a friendly, welcoming community for international visitors.

I’ve got my eye on WOTP at the moment, and Cross Flow is also on my list.

Would love to hear your recommendations or favourite European events! 🥰

TIA!!

Tempo Tunes builds playlists where every song holds a target tempo. Pick a BPM and genres, and it pulls from 1.5M+ tempo-verified tracks and growing, then saves the playlist to Apple Music, Tidal, or YouTube Music so you can play it anywhere.

It was built for workouts, but dancers keep teaching me things. When I asked the ballroom community this week, their verdict was that BPM accuracy matters more than anything else, and it struck me that westies might be the most tempo-aware dancers of all.

So, honest questions for people who actually dance it: would filtering songs by exact BPM help you build practice or social playlists? And what ranges do you actually live in? I've seen everything from high-70s bluesy songs to 120s described as danceable, and I'd rather hear it from the floor than from a chart. Also curious what current tools get wrong about westie music, since "danceable for WCS" clearly means more than a number.

Free, no ads, genuinely after feedback more than downloads: https://www.tempo-tunes.com

I’ve been building a dance tracking app (think Strava for dance 💃🕺) and I’m getting ready to start a beta test.

It lets you log dance sessions, styles, and notes from classes, socials, and practice.

I’m looking for Android users who would be willing to try it out and give me some feedback.

If you’re interested, you can join the email list here:
https://forms.gle/2xvpuRTo6apbp5yEA