“On a personal level, Tessa and Myles have both personally helped me move beyond my limits.  They are encouraging as teachers, their collective knowledge of movement and dance, and sheer experience shines through in their interaction.  Their private lessons are effective, but be prepared to work: their analysis and attention to details leave no stone unturned.  They move beyond the monkey-see-monkey-do by presenting the concepts behind the ideas, reinforcing the foundations beneath the help you want.  Be prepared to walk away from these guys a better dancer!”

“I absolutely love Myles and Tessa’s approach to teaching. In just the first hour I spent with them, so many light bulbs were set off that I had to stop so I could start trying to keep track. They have a sincerity about them that I really appreciate. They’re really intent on helping me not just become a better dancer, but to understand what makes me a better dancer. It’s some of the best stuff you could hope to get from a teacher.”

I feel as though in other intensives, instructors will demonstrate patterns and strategies, but will not connect these to the basic skills that are required to perform these patterns/strategies. Myles and Tessa do a fantastic job explaining what prerequisite skills are required to compete the task at hand, and that helps people catch onto the material SO MUCH quicker.

We have a huge class of dancers (especially leaders) who are missing critical skills in their dance, trying to perform patterns and strategies in which they don’t have the underlying/supporting skills for. Swing Literacy focuses specifically on filling those gaps in dancers’ skill base. I definitely attribute MUCH of my success to your teaching style of skills before patterns.

Though we have different learning styles — one of us is a kinesthetic learner and the other an analytic learner who translates words into motion — Myles and Tessa have effectively taught us both in joint lessons.   We developed not only our technique and ability to execute moves, but also our ability to further build dancing skills on our own.

“I have taken lessons and workshops with both Myles and Tessa and have been impressed with their professional approach to teaching. Having come from a long history of “other” dance forms it was refreshing to be welcomed and encouraged to explore the script of West Coast Swing and then to be enthusiastically encouraged to incorporate my knowledge from my previous career in ballet, tap, contemporary, flamenco, jazz..SOOOO much fun! Their honesty and support in growing up in WCS is valuable to all and certainly appreciated by me.”