Facing each other, by ourselves, man and ladies step.

Gentlemen, we’re going to start you off, always, with the left foot.

The ladies, start you off, always, with the right foot.

We begin. Gentlemen,

walk forward 2 steps, lady walks back 2 steps,

and…walk, walk. A little sidestep,

men’s left foot, lady’s right foot, close the feet, change weight.

And we count, slow..slow..quick-quick.

In reverse, meaning the ladies will now come forward,

and the gentlemen will go back. Same rule,

always start with the men’s left, always start with the ladies’ right,

and slow..slow..quick-quick. As you can see,

we have two halves of a basic step: the forward half,

and the back half. When one partner goes forward,

the other partner goes back. We now join together.

Dance hold, as in the other dances, offset to the left, right foot point between

our partners’ feet would be perfect, and we have…

and slow..slow..quick-quick, slow..slow..quick-quick.

If we do it facing you, and we have…

and slow..slow..quick-quick (x4). We’ve already given you a description of

the dance hold, so we don’t need to do that again.

With basic, the important thing is, once again, staying off to your own left side

looking over each other’s shoulders, fairly close together.

Don’t have too much space because too much space will cause the two partners to separate

easily, and we don’t want that.

We want to stay together. Yeah?

Now, we’ll show that to you with the music. Basic step to Foxtrot.

And as you can see, what we did was gently curve it around the

room, counter-clockwise.

And this is how people always move around the room,

counter-clockwise, in these dances called the “standard”

dances or “smooth” dances. So the Waltz, Tango, Foxtrot, Quickstep, Viennese

Waltz, called the “standard” dances,

all move around the room counter-clockwise.