Sugar Hill Hop

Building awareness of your body and your partner while developing comfort in the social dance environment. No partner required as we will rotate throughout class and no previous dance experience needed, as we will always start from the beginning. You’re discovering what connection feels like – recognising tension and compression, maintaining simple posture, and finding your own rhythm in the music. Small changes take conscious effort and a few attempts. You’re introduced to the origins of the dance: a tradition rooted in the Savoy Ballroom and created by Black artists. Our goal to get you ready for Level 1: We’ll work with you until you can comfortably maintain basic connections across different partners and can actively notice when something feels off.

Developing consistent fundamentals and beginning to connect your movement to the music. You’re building consistency in the five core elements across different partners. You recognise when your movement doesn’t match your intention and can self-correct with some prompting. Concepts are starting to connect, and you are exploring the music even more now, it is something you are dancing with, not just alongside. Our goal to get you ready for Level 2: We’ll have you dancing socially as a regular, integrating changes quickly, and maintaining your quality regardless of partner. And get you to ask questions like, do you like this dance, what do you think about the music?

Maintaining dance integrity across different partners and situations while developing personal expression within the vernacular tradition. Reliable consistency in both partnered and solo contexts. You identify and correct errors as they happen without external prompting, maintain rhythm across various tempos, and recover gracefully from disruptions. Personal interpretation is emerging – you’re beginning to solidify your voice and expression on the dance floor. Our goal to get you ready for Level 3: We will equip you to dance with complete beginners without losing your own integrity. We’ll also guide you toward starting constructive improvisation that actually makes sense within the dance.

Navigating any partnership with integrity, innovating within the improvisational tradition, and embodying the technical and cultural depth of the dance. Your integrity holds regardless of partner experience. You anticipate and micro-adjust seamlessly, integrate new concepts within the same session, and generate your own movement ideas rooted in the dance’s traditions. You are starting to handle competition and performance settings with consistency. Our goal to get you ready for Level 4: We aim to help improve your integrity further and that your consistency is dependable in many if not all settings, and that your dance partners would readily attest that you communicate well, the ability to talk and articulate the dance and connect well within a partnership. Evidence based results that your partnership ability is how well you work together, not just the moves you can lead or follow – this is the truest indicator of your level.

A mastery of movement and musical connection while serving as a steward of the dance’s heritage, local community and beyond internationally should you decide to take that route. You dance and learn with confidence across multiple contexts that you dance in – social, performance, competition, learning in fast-paced or challenging environments, and you have already started to enter peer-teaching/working with others to improve your dancing. Self-awareness is instinctive. You generate original concepts, communicate them clearly, and integrate feedback instantaneously. Under pressure, you are consistent and composed. You have become a versatile dancer at this point. You are studying as a steward of this dance’s heritage and trying to widen your understanding of how your movements are influenced by its heritage. Our goal: To help you become a versatile, composed, and community-minded dancer that keeps in mind the values that support the dance’s future.