Private tuition from a choreographer who listens to the track properly before deciding a single move. Ninety seconds of calm or eight lessons of open ambition — whichever you are after, the routine is written for that song and for the two of you.
Every package is priced
further down this page.
Six fields is the whole ask. Somebody here reads what you write, listens to the track if you have named one, and then telephones to talk about how much dance the song can carry.
Happier looking at figures before you write anything? The prices are printed a little further on, all five of them.
Check availability for your date.
Some couples want three minutes that genuinely surprise the room. Others want a short, handsome dance and a good photograph. Both are proper answers. The only poor one is choosing the ambitious version without booking the rehearsal time to carry it, which is why the packages are laid out plainly on this page.
Waterside hotels, converted warehouse spaces, golf-club function rooms out towards Chandler's Ford, country houses on the New Forest edge beyond Totton. Plenty of Southampton venues give you a floor big enough for a routine that travels, and that single fact changes what is worth choreographing.
Tempo, where the chorus lands, whether the song ends or simply fades at the mixing desk — these shape a first dance far more than square metres do. Your instructor times the track before promising anything, because a beautiful idea in the wrong tempo is not a beautiful idea.
Instructors here are matched to couples by three things: the part of the city you are in, the dates you need, and the sort of dance you have described on the form. Their name reaches you well before any lesson is agreed.
Someone at home building a big, travelling routine is not automatically the right teacher for a couple who want to move quietly and be left in peace, and the reverse holds too. So we take the style question on the enquiry form seriously rather than treating it as decoration.
Whoever you end up with writes the choreography themselves, from your record, for your two bodies and their two different levels of nerve. There is no folder of previous weddings to borrow from, because we have never kept one. And if your ambition grows after lesson two, the routine grows with it rather than starting again from nothing.
Five packages, five printed figures, per couple rather than per person. They are the same in Southampton as anywhere else we teach, so there is no quote to chase and nothing to negotiate.
Each figure buys the choreography and the teaching, wherever the lesson takes place. Should the routine turn out to want more time than you first booked, further lessons can be arranged as you go — a decision for later, not for today. Ambition is priced in: every package below can end in a first dance in Southampton worth filming.
The song is the starting gun. Tell us what it is.
Send it over Or telephone 07337 111560 and hum it at usThree kinds of floor, and couples building anything ambitious usually work through all three before the wedding arrives.
Terraces in Freemantle and Portswood, flats around Ocean Village, family houses out at Bassett, Bitterne and Sholing. A cleared living room is plenty for learning the material itself. It is only the travelling sections that eventually ask for more square metres.
For anything with travel in it, an hour in the actual room earns its keep. You find out how far the floor really extends, where the band or the DJ will be set up, and whether the sweep you love survives the position of the tables.
When the choreography outgrows the house, a floor is hired near you and the session moves there for as long as it needs to. Which room depends on your side of Southampton and what is free that week; you are told where before you leave the house.
Portswood, Shirley, Freemantle, Bassett, Highfield, Bitterne, Woolston, Sholing, Millbrook and the centre, then out to Eastleigh, Chandler's Ford, Hedge End, Botley, Totton, Romsey, Hythe and the villages along the New Forest edge. Winchester and Fareham are comfortably within reach as well.
The showstoppers people talk about afterwards are seldom the technically hardest. They are the ones rehearsed until both dancers look unhurried. A lift attempted twice is alarming; the same lift on its fortieth run is simply a thing you do. Eight lessons exist to buy that fortieth run, not to buy harder steps than you need.
Six minutes is too long, and most couples work that out late. A track can usually be cut at a seam — the tail of a chorus, a bar of instrumental — so the dance ends on purpose instead of fading while the room waits politely. Name the song on the form and it gets timed at the first lesson.
Nearby on the south coast Wedding dance lessons in Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Guildford, Reading and Brighton.
These lean on music and ambition. Everything else you might want to ask sits on the main page.
Almost none of them do. A dance that outlasts the room's attention is a common regret, and the remedy is an edit rather than more choreography. Your instructor will find a seam in the track, usually at the end of a chorus, and shape the routine to finish there. Your DJ or band then only needs the agreed stopping point.
Yes, and it often makes the better dance. A gear change gives the routine an obvious shape: something calm, then something with more in it. What matters is rehearsing the join, because that is the moment where couples hesitate. We drill the four bars either side of it more than anything else.
For most couples, yes, provided the lift suits your two bodies rather than the one you saw online. Your instructor will say honestly in the first session whether a particular idea is sensible, and will offer an alternative if it is not. Nothing is attempted at full height until it is reliable at knee height, and nothing goes into the routine that either of you dreads.
It changes the tempo, almost always. Ask the band for a rehearsal recording of their version, or at least an agreed speed, and bring that to your lessons. Where that is not possible we build a routine with a little give in it, so a slightly faster or slower band does not leave you stranded halfway.
Not wasted, but it should be designed for the actual space. Small rooms reward turning, close hold and clear shapes; wide travelling steps get lost when guests are two feet from your elbow. Tell us the room and the choreography is scaled to it, which is a different job from cutting bits out later.
Happily, though the answer is usually less dramatic than expected. Play both candidates in the first lesson and dance a few bars to each. One of them almost always turns out to be easier to move to, and that settles the argument on evidence rather than taste. If both work, you choose.
It happens often enough that we plan for it. If the new track is close in tempo, most of the material transfers with small adjustments. If it is wildly different, expect to lose a lesson's worth of progress and say so early rather than late. Nobody will be cross with you either way.
You have a song and a date. That is genuinely all we need to begin.
Plan the Southampton routine £75 for a single lesson · per couple · anywhere in Southampton