When learning to dance, nothing is better than a class you attend in person with an instructor to make sure you are doing the moves correctly. However, watching and following along with videos of dance lessons online can be helpful as a refresher or to help you learn the basics of the dance style that interests you the most. Numerous websites are available to teach you different dance styles for free with just a few clicks of your mouse.
Great Online Dance Lessons
Multiple Styles
Some websites focus on a single style of dance, such as hip hop, ballroom, country line dance, and belly dance. Other sites offer lessons for a variety of dance genres, such as:
- Howcast provides instructional videos for numerous styles including ballet, reggae, and ballroom dance.
- LearntoDance.com offers free dance lessons in text and video formats. Styles covered include ballroom dancing, hip hop, Latin dance, swing, and tap.
Ballet
Cosmo Learning is an educational website that provides classes on various topics, and it offers a 15-video series of ballet lessons. These lessons are aimed at beginners and cover steps like the plie, glissade, chaîné turn, pique, and small jumps. The lessons are taught by Eileen O'Brien, an instructor at the Suncoast Dance & Music Academy in St. Petersburg, Florida. Eileen teaches the plie in this video.
Tap
Masters Of American Tap is a YouTube channel conceived by Fred Stickler and featuring instructional tap dance lessons taught by various master teachers including Gene Medler, Sarah Petronio, Fred Stickler, Gabe Copeland, and Barbara Duffy. Many of these videos are for intermediate and advanced tap students, but a few can teach beginners some basic patterns, like this video by Joy Hewitt.
Street Dance
- Studio TTV has a YouTube channel with dozens of videos that teach various hip hop steps, choreographies, and dance tips for students and teachers. Some videos show dance crew performances and flash mobs that aren't lessons, but which are good examples of street choreographies.
- Cypher Styles presents step-by-step instructions on hip hop, techno, break dancing, club, and house dance styles. They also sell instructional DVDs, but the site offers plenty of free videos to teach you the basics of street dance. Here is one of their videos that gives a lot of repetition, which is very helpful for students learning a new dance step.
Belly Dance
- Belly Dances with Tiazza offers free belly dance classes that cover everything you need to know including technique, arm movements, turns, shimmies and more. Classes on dancing with props, such as veils, swords, and Isis wings are also available for free. Tiazza offers classes at beginning and advanced levels.
- Essence of Belly Dance is a school run by Coco, who offers classes in Germany and free lessons online. The free classes are geared toward the entry and beginner levels and cover moves like hip circles, hip lifts, snake arms, and chest slides in addition to warm-up exercises, posture, stretches, and drills. In the following video, Coco demonstrates how to do a hip camel.
Dance Lessons for Children
- JamTimeDanceTV has a YouTube channel with free hip hop lessons geared toward children. The lessons are taught by choreographer Ruben "Fusion" Monet and other instructors.
- Fit For a Feast is a website created by two young dancers who wanted to share their love of dance with other children. For this project, they've reached out to other dancers and instructors and now offer a variety of instructional videos that cover several dance genres, including ballet, hip hop, and Latin dance.
Learning to Dance
If you are looking for guidance on how to do a specific dance, try asking local dance academies for suggestions. They may offer some free online dance lessons to give prospective students a taste of the kind of classes they offer onsite, or they may be able to direct you to other high-quality sources. Since these lessons are free, it can help to try a few from different sources to see which ones best fit your style of learning.
