Bring the track. Everything after it — the steps, the shape, how long it runs and where the two of you are looking — gets written to fit, at your house, at the venue, or on a floor hired close by.
The prices are below —
all five, without asterisks
Six boxes, one of which asks what you are dancing to. A real person reads the answer, then telephones to talk about tempo, length, and what the song will let you do.
Not decided on a song? Say so in the box. Half the couples on this page had not either. The prices are below in any case.
Check availability for your date.
One of you has had the track settled since roughly the second date. The other has been quietly hoping it might yet change. Somewhere between the two positions is a dance that suits both of you, and locating it is the first thing your instructor does.
A college hall with a wooden floor and portraits looking down, a barn on the Cotswold edge, a marquee on a lawn near Wolvercote, a register office in the morning with a long lunch in Jericho after it. Each of those rooms flatters a different song and a different quantity of dancing.
Tempo decides what is physically available to you. A track at sixty beats a minute wants weight and stillness; one at a hundred and twenty wants footwork. Your choreographer listens to the whole thing before writing a single step, and will say plainly if the song is working against you.
Lessons here are taught by an instructor covering Oxford and the county around it. Every routine they teach is their own work, written for the couple in front of them out of the music that couple chose.
That matters most where music is concerned. A dance built on a generic count and then bolted onto your track always looks faintly wrong, and a room full of guests senses it without being able to say why. Working the other way round — track first, movement second — is slower and considerably better.
If the song turns out to be genuinely awkward to dance to, you will hear that early, together with the two or three ways round it. Nobody will pretend a four-minute lament is easy going.
Five packages. Five numbers. Each one is for the couple rather than the head, and each is the same in Oxford as it is in Aberdeen, because what gets taught is the same.
Prices are per couple and include the teaching wherever in Oxfordshire we meet you. If three lessons turn into a wish for five, extra sessions can be added on the end — ask your instructor and you will be told the figure before anything is arranged.
You already have the song. The rest of it is our problem.
Take me to the form Or ring 07337 111560 with the track in your headLessons come to you, and which of the three you use tends to follow the music: quiet songs get learned at home, ambitious ones want space early on.
Terraces in East Oxford, flats in Summertown, cottages out towards Eynsham, a kitchen in Marston with the table shoved back against the wall. It is where the awkward first run-throughs belong, with the song coming out of a speaker you already know the sound of.
College halls, barns and marquees behave nothing like a front room, and a track that seemed merely slow at home can turn glacial in a large stone space. Where the venue will have us, an hour there resets your sense of the music entirely.
For the lessons that want proper floor — long travelling steps, anything with speed in it — we book a room near you in Oxford. Private, for your hour only, and confirmed at the point the lesson goes in the diary.
Jericho, Summertown, Headington, Cowley, Iffley, Marston, Osney, Botley and Wolvercote, out through Kidlington, Eynsham, Abingdon, Witney and Woodstock, and on to Bicester, Thame, Wallingford, Didcot, Wantage, Burford and Chipping Norton. Ninety seconds of intention beats five minutes of hoping; that is a first dance in Oxford done well.
Some couples want thirty seconds and a hug, and that is a legitimate first dance. The work involved is small: decide how you get onto the floor, agree one turn, agree how it stops. Three decisions convert shuffling into something that looks chosen.
The other option is to let the music supply the ambition. Nearly every track has one moment — a key change, a drop, the point where the strings arrive — and putting your single big idea exactly there is worth more than a minute of clever footwork nobody will remember.
Elsewhere in the region There are pages for Reading, Cheltenham, Swindon, Gloucester and Milton Keynes too.
The local and musical ones are here. Shoes, timings and lesson counts are answered on the main page.
Gladly, though arbitration suits us better than choosing for you. Bring both tracks to the first lesson in Oxford and your instructor will dance a minute of each with you. Songs feel very different once you are actually moving to them, and the argument tends to settle itself inside ten minutes.
Almost nobody does. A first dance that goes much past two minutes usually needs the guests invited on to survive. Your instructor picks the stretch of the track worth dancing to, and your DJ or band can fade or cut at the agreed point — tell them well before the day rather than on it.
Yes, and free-tempo songs often make the nicest first dances. Rather than counting, the routine is pinned to landmarks in the music: a lyric, a chord change, the moment the drums arrive. You learn the landmarks instead of the numbers, which holds up better under pressure than counting does.
Often, yes. A single lesson can give you an entrance, a hold that photographs well, one turn and an ending you both know is coming. If you leave wanting more, three lessons is the usual next step, but nobody is going to telephone you pushing for it.
It matters enough to plan around. Live versions run at a different tempo and often gain an intro. Ask the band for a rough length and, if they will, a recording of their arrangement. The routine then gets pinned to landmarks that survive a slightly different tempo rather than to a stopwatch.
Not in our experience, and the two get paired constantly round here. A short, warm first dance followed by an hour of everybody being flung about by a caller reads as a well-planned evening. If anything, keeping the first dance modest makes the contrast work harder.
Yes, and couples do. Early on it costs nothing but a rethink. In the last fortnight it will cost you some of the polish, because the routine has to be rebuilt around new landmarks. Tell your instructor the moment you start wavering rather than the moment you have decided.
Play the song once more, then fill this in. It will still be the song afterwards.
Plan your Oxford first dance £75 for the first hour · per couple · anywhere in Oxfordshire