Nobody hands over money for private tuition without knowing what they are walking into. So here is the whole arrangement in order: what you send, who telephones you, how an instructor gets picked, where the teaching happens, and what the last lesson before the wedding is actually for.
Six stages —
none of them mysterious
The form is deliberately short, and half of it is optional. We would far rather read a vague enquiry today than a beautifully complete one in a month's time, once the good dates have gone.
Whereabouts you live, roughly when you are getting married, and the track if there is one. Approximations are welcome — couples write ‘somewhere in the autumn’ and a shrug where the venue should be, and the enquiry works perfectly well.
A signed venue, an agreed song, a decision about which package, or the faintest evidence that either of you can dance. Sorting those out is the job, not the entry requirement for it.
Not an automated reply, not a link to a booking calendar. Someone reads what you wrote and rings the number you gave us — or writes instead, if that is what you asked for.
The conversation runs on questions rather than patter. How much floor is there where you live? Is the reception room a village hall or a hotel ballroom? How many weeks are left? Which of you is dreading it more?
By the time you hang up you will know which package suits the dance you have described, exactly what it costs, and where your lessons could plausibly take place. It is not unusual for the recommendation to be smaller than the one the caller had in mind — a great many couples need three lessons and are braced to be sold eight.
Nothing gets booked while you are on the phone unless you want it booked.
We work with wedding dance instructors across sixty towns and cities. Yours is the one who covers your patch and has space in the diary for your particular run-up.
The choreography always belongs to the instructor teaching it. There is no company routine in a drawer waiting to be handed out, and no syllabus anybody is working through in order. Your first dance begins as an empty page with your song playing over it, which is why we can never tell you in advance precisely what will be taught in lesson two.
It also means the method belongs to the person teaching you. One instructor will build the ending first, on the grounds that endings are what nerves attack. Another spends the opening twenty minutes on nothing more exotic than walking together in time. Both approaches produce couples who look like they meant it.
What stays constant is the arrangement around it: private tuition for the two of you, a routine built to your song, and the same prices wherever in the country you happen to live.
No timetable is promised here, because the person teaching you writes their own. But couples reasonably want to know the usual shape of it, and the usual shape is this.
Mostly watching and listening. Your instructor hears the track properly, sees how the pair of you move when nobody is counting, sizes up the floor, and leaves you with something small that already works.
Adding and discarding. Material goes in, some of it comes back out because it suited a different pair of shoulders, and the counting gradually stops being said out loud.
Rehearsal, not invention. Nothing new is introduced. You run the dance, run it in the actual shoes, run the walk onto the floor, and run the finish until it survives being interrupted, laughed at and started from the wrong bar.
How many lessons sit between the first and the last is your decision, taken on the phone and revisable afterwards — couples add sessions considerably more often than they drop them. Every package price covers the teaching wherever we meet you: at home, at your venue, or on a floor we hire nearby.
Six stages. One phone call. The hard part is the first message.
Send yours Or ring 07337 111560 if typing is the long way roundWhatever gets built in a lesson has to survive the week that follows it, and that week is where the routine stops being homework. Your instructor will tell you what to run through and, more usefully, what to leave severely alone until you meet again. It costs nothing and it does more than anything we can charge you for.
Tell whoever controls the music exactly where your track starts and where it stops, and make sure one person knows to clear a route to the floor. Neither takes five minutes. Both go wrong when everybody assumes somebody else has it in hand.
Nobody stands at the edge of the floor mouthing counts at you. By the last lesson the dance belongs to the two of you, which is rather the point of learning it privately in the first place — the version your guests see is the one you can do without help.
Where to go next The full price list, the two-hour rescue session for a wedding that is almost here, or the town-by-town locations index.
These are about how the arrangement runs. Questions about the dancing itself are answered on the main page.
Your enquiry lands in a mailbox that a person opens, and it gets answered by voice unless you have asked us to write instead. We are not going to invent a guaranteed response time here, but there is nothing to be gained by leaving enquiries to go stale, and we do not.
No, and it would be a poor one if it were. Most of the call is us asking about your room, your date and your track. Quite often the sensible recommendation is a smaller package than the caller rang up expecting to buy.
Your instructor writes it, you veto it. Nothing survives to the wedding if one of you hates doing it — a move you are secretly dreading will find you out on the night. Say so in the lesson and it gets replaced, which is a normal part of the process rather than an awkward moment.
None. There is no club to join, nothing to sign on the doorstep and no scheme to be enrolled in. The arrangement is lessons, dates and a price, all agreed in conversation with you.
It is early, but it costs nothing to get in touch and be told so. A long run-up buys relaxed spacing rather than a longer routine, and some couples enquire now, talk it through, and start lessons months later.
Say it to your instructor. Extra lessons can be added to what you have already booked at the same per-couple rates, and this happens more than the reverse — enthusiasm tends to arrive around lesson three, once the thing starts to look like a dance.
No. Every lesson is the two of you and your instructor, which is why the routine can be built around your particular knees, your particular song and the particular floor you will be standing on.
Fill this in with whatever you know today. Half-answers are fine; the phone call exists to fill in the rest.
Doing the sums before the talking? Every price is published in full, so you can cost this out without speaking to a soul.
Check availability for your date.
Every couple we teach was once a couple who had not sent the form yet.
Start at stage one £75 buys one lesson for the pair of you, wherever we teach