Product Description

The Ultimate Emergency Dance Lessons DVD brings professional dance instruction into the home, totally de-mystifying it and inspiring confidence. Each dance is separated into a "show section" - where professional couples perform the dance in formal costum

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51022 in DVD
• Brand: Ultimate
• Released on: 2006-10-10
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 113 minutes

Customer Reviews

About 10 minute explanations of 9 dance styles
This was presented well w/good menu system. Bonus includes bios of the very talented & professional dancers (about 3 different couples) who have great talent & fun to watch. The music chosen fits with the dance.
Dance Styles: Foxtrot, Modern Waltz, Rock & Roll, Disco, Salsa, Viennese Waltz, Chachacha, Tango & in the bonus section: Merengue. Each lesson is about 10 minutes long.
Lesson content: Everything is set on a dance floor w/good lighting. You watch an advanced look of a style of dance for about 2 minutes by a couple which is done very well to great music. Next they show the dancers starting the tutorial with usually the man facing your or the side profiles of the dancers. They then have the dancers do a few steps in 1/2 speed (sometimes slow-mo but usually the dancers will move that slow) while a male voice over (informative/very helpful, very stiff/professional sound, but a little passion to keep you from snoring) points out general guidelines about how to move. They then do those few steps in normal speed w/music. Then on to the next set of moves. And on on & ends with them dancing all the moves they taught w/music. If there are any turns, they will show it, but again only in 1/2 time with only major points told. There are some zoomed in angles, but mostly it's a wide angle back camera to see both dancers at once at all times. There are no only man or only woman angles or any practice time. Only a quick explanation which can be said while a dancer dances 1/2 speed. Depending on how advanced the dance is done when first shown, the moves you taught are able to be done w/o athleticism needed but still advanced enough to impress others.

This was well done overall, I wasn't bored (WONDERFUL DANCERS), I did learn a lot in terms of understanding some of the major points, but I still think a more practice type would help encourage you to practice rather then just watching. I know that can trap a program into being boring like almost all dance lesson videos, but if it's done with a sense of silly fun instead of dry, stiff boring speech, I think it would be a hit. Since there is no practice, you will need to replay this dvd many times.
Trailer on youtube.

Disappointing
This video was often difficult to follow. The narrator is British, not American, and his terms were not always clear. Further, the clips were much too fast to follow, with few opportunities for repetition and practice. We found that the camerawork was frustrating, as sometimes they showed just the feet and sometimes just the upper body, but rarely both. My advice is to download the dance steps off the Internet- that's what we ended up doing.

Helpful, but still a little advanced for beginning dancers.
Good video, but still too advanced for beginning dancers. We had fun trying to do the dances, but needed to have more step by step directions.