Posts Tagged ‘wedding dances’

by Amber McNeil

Dancing is “the best therapy you will ever pay for”

The Bride and Groom’s first dance is always a soft spot among wedding spectators.  While it is one of the favorite moments for wedding guests, it can be a potentially stressful three minutes for the bride and groom.   To help ease some of the stress, I spoke with Amber Sanders (yes, we’re both Amber) a 3 year instructor and Guest Director at Arthur Murray Dance Studio downtown.  Amber gave me the in’s and out’s of learning to boogie with your honey.  She has been dancing since she was a little girl in the south suburbs of Chicago, loves dancing ballroom and Cha Cha, and supremely enjoys teaching Rhumba and Salsa.  Amber even spent five years as a dancer on a cruise ship!  She has done it all in the way of dance and said the emergence in the last 2 years with brides and grooms taking lessons has been a lot of fun for her professionally.

Amber’s best advice is to start early.  Based on the couple’s experience the best time to start dance lessons is 4-6 months before the wedding day.  This will give the couple a chance to really get to know their song and steps and be relaxed when the big day comes.  The average couple comes about once a week to keep the music fresh in their mind.  This way, they are not playing catch up and relearning the dance at each lesson.  Also, by starting early, the couple is more than ready in the couple weeks leading up to the wedding and can concentrate on other last minute details.

The first dance is ‘the best part of wedding planning’, according to Amber.  It is a chance for the bride and groom to really work together as a couple in a long term setting.  It’s also a fun environment to blow off some steam at the end of the day.  Dance lessons can give the couple something really great to do together and look forward to during the week.  It’s also the gift that keeps on giving.  Dancing is a skill that can be used for the rest of the bride and groom’s life and can be continued well after that first dance has come and gone!

As far as picking a song is concerned, it’s very personalized depending on the couple.  Bride and groom want to make sure to pick a song that has an emotional backing and means something to them as a couple.  Amber and Arthur Murray make sure to work with each couple on an individualized basis and have a real conversation around the first dance.  They want to make sure they know if there is a DJ versus a band, the timeline of the dance, and what actually made the couple pick the song! They want to make sure the first dance is not just your run of the mill cookie cutter dance.

As for the ultimate dance question of all time:  Footloose or Flashdance??

Amber’s answer: Footloose.  I knew I liked this woman!

Get some more wedding dance advice at the Arthur Murray Wedding Homepage.

120 Connect: Episode 4, Viral Wedding Videos from Fig Media on Vimeo.

Blog entry from 120 Connect:

“Everyone is discussing: What is viral video? What makes things go viral?

Some of the widest circulated videos are uploaded by you. They get passed around because they are funny, shocking, moving or clever. So when creating something that you want to go viral, follow this rule:

If you want to watch it over and over, send it to all of your friends and so on…then you are onto something. If you don’t like it…it won’t get passed around.

In this episode, James Gustin and Melissa Martens explore this topic using their favorite viral wedding videos.

Why wedding videos?

James started his company, fig media, 15 years ago with wife Michele Gustin. They operated out of their apartment deejaying and documenting weddings. Their vision on documenting the American wedding was unique in the industry at the time. They focused on telling great stories through getting to know their couples and their families, telling the story of the day through documentary style cinematography. This was years before the trend started to catch fire. Today fig media has a team of film makers, deejays and photographers delivering this same vision, using weddings as a way to develop themselves as artists. Together they are developing the fig films brand to further their mission of telling great stories. fig holds the art of documenting a wedding as an honor, documenting and making films for families that will live on for generations. Being passionate about this mission, the film team is always looking at what couples are doing with their videos…and it just so happened that these wedding videos were starting to get notice from 23 million people…so being curious fig wanted to dig into why.

So we have included the videos below for your viewing pleasure. Post your favorite viral video in the comment box!

Recently one of these clips show up on the ABC tv show Flash Forward, kudos to you if you can figure out which one.

Check back next week when Kevin returns to talk about how companies are using social media to create a new type of website…you won’t want to miss this, its super cool!”