I’ve been seeing more interest in what I’ll generically call pattern dances. By this, I mean dances that are set to specific choreography and then danced socially, either in a formation (e.g., line dances) or as partner dances. Since this strays far from my own dance experience, I am struggling both with terminology and how to provide effective support for this kind of dance. I also noticed the last time I looked, there is considerable support for things like step sheets, so I don’t want to duplicate effort, especially since places like CopperKnob seem to have this aspect well covered.

Finding new music for Pattern Dances

Community member tzielund reached out and reinforced my view that there are aspects of the music4dance database that could be particularly helpful for folks interested in these kinds of dances. The general idea is that since music4dance contains a significant catalog of songs categorized by dance style (in the, dare I say, conventional sense of ballroom and partner dances) as well as often containing tempo and meter information, one could look up a song on which a pattern dance was originally choreographed and find other songs that are similar. This is exactly what spurred this post. But it’s great to have someone with a line dance background come to the same conclusion.

Finding dances similar to a Pattern Dance

In addition, Tom succeeded in using the musci4dance database for something that’s almost the opposite of the above. Here’s my paraphrase of his journey: Someone asked on a line-dance forum for recommendations for dances similar to The Vibe, a dance set to the song “Vibe” by Mullally. Music4dance shows Vibe as West Coast Swing. He then looked for another song in music4dance with WCS and about 100 BPM.  There were plenty of matches ordered by dancability, but the first one he recognized as another line dance was Pontoon for the Little Big Town song of the same name. He said that he would never have made this connection mentally — Vibe is kind of a disco-style, while Pontoon is very much country.  But in his opinion, the dances are actually very similar in style, and even share some of the same steps.

How we’ve structured Pattern Dances

The other valuable thing  Tom provided was a list of songs he uses for line dances, along with names of the dances and other details. He and I then went back and forth a bit to structure a Pattern Dance category in music4dance that made sense to both of us, and I uploaded his information as a batch.

This is where we landed. I’d love to get feedback from others with knowledge in this area, as there is always room for improvement. And while the database of pattern dances is relatively small, I’ll still be able to do some restructuring relatively easily.

First, rather than trying to create a new dance in the database for each different kind of pattern dance, I created a single dance called Pattern and added a Line Dance tag to the dances to distinguish them from other types of pattern dances, like the partner pattern dances I’ve blogged about before.

Then, we decided that the name of the specific Line Dance and its choreographer are important pieces of information. For now, we’re adding them as comments on the dance tag. If I get enough interest, I can add specific searchable fields for these, but that’s a bigger lift, and I think a specially formatted comment field will work pretty well for now. If we stick to the format, by very specifically laying these as"Dance Name" by Choreographer Name, people should be able to search for dances easily. Putting quotes around the dance name helps the search index limit results to just the dances, rather than songs that include those words.

I’ve also added tags that Tom included for the dance level, such as Beginner and Intermediate.

Finally, Tom included links to the Step Sheets for each dance. I didn’t want to expose those without permission from the specific site he was referencing, but I plan to reach out to them to make sure they’re okay with these links and then decide how to handle them.

Again, I’m a bit out of my depth on these kinds of dances, so the more feedback I can get from people who are, the better I will be able to support them.

Step of the Month

The “Step of the Month” for June is to check your account management page. As you may have noticed, it is nice to see the songs another user has tagged (in this case, tzielund’s songs). This information is available only to other logged-in members of the community, so please consider making your information available by checking the “Share my Profile” option to improve other members’ experience (the alternative is that your votes and tags are attributed to an anonymous user, which is much less friendly).