If you want to learn how to dance like Lady Gaga, your first stop would be her videos. Probably you have already seen lots of them if you have the goal to learn to dance this way; however, there are additional ways to learn and fine-tune her choreography that can bring you beyond the basics you can pick up from her videos.
Learning How to Dance Like Lady Gaga
Aside from being a talented performer, Lady Gaga is also a master of the publicity campaign. She has reality TV segments, billboards, commercials, and her songs dominate pop radio. She has an over-the-top costume style that goes beyond the ridiculous and into the sublime. The sum total of her catchy tunes, flashy video editing, and outrageous outfits mask the fact that her dancing is actually very simple.
This is good news for anyone who wants to learn these kinds of moves - and it's not a slam on Lady Gaga's talent, either. It is not everyone who will be able to pull off the full Gaga-esque effect that she's created. In terms of just learning to dance in her style, it's more about changing your frame of mind than anything else.
Style vs. Substance
As J Kimi's dance tutorial for "Bad Romance" states, dancing like Lady Gaga is less about "precision and accuracy" and more about "style and attitude." As he portrays in the tutorial, this can be as simple as a pair of sunglasses and striking a dramatic frozen pose.
As he breaks down the basic dance choreography, he shows how simple moves combined with confidence and fully-engaged body mechanics (that is, no half-gestures - when you stretch your arm out, you stretch it all the way out) can create amazingly captivating dances. For example, there is a move in the Bad Romance video that consists of a series of bilaterally symmetrical hand and arm poses. J Kimi explains it this way:
- "Oh no, there's a monster!" (hold both hands, fingers stretched, in front of your mouth)
- "I surrender! Don't hurt me!" (arms bent, hands held out to side, palms facing audience)
- "...because I'm EM cute!" (arms stretch down, hands flexed at the wrist and held parallel to the floor, about a hand's breadth from the hips)
Other parts of the dance have similar mnemonic tools, like "I'm a monster" for when the hands are clawing the air in front of the face or "Love..." when tracing a heart shape in the air. While there are complete videos of the "full dance" (though this is amateur, and therefore can't be verified) you don't have to use those in order to pull off the "Lady Gaga" effect. This is only one of many online dance tutorials.
Strength in Numbers
The other strength of Lady Gaga's dance videos is that she tends to put in many unison moves. She will have other dancers - usually looking very similar to her - doing the moves as well, and as these are professional dancers, the eye is fooled into transferring all of their precision to her. If you can get a group of friends all knowing how to do the moves, you can all pull off a fair approximation of the Lady Gaga style of dance. Facing is important in this kind of maneuver - if you're all facing each other in a circle, it probably won't look as good as if you do a line-dance formation.
Again, this is not to say Lady Gaga is not an accomplished dancer herself. Her attitude combined with a solid grounding in disco, jazz and hip hop styles gives her an immense advantage in terms of pure entertainment value. Taking classes in these styles can certainly help you learn how to dance like Lady Gaga and, more importantly, help you develop the confidence she has. In fact, you could put up your own "Lady Gaga" spoof video, such as the "Bad (Bro)Mance" from Shane Dawson. If you have the attitude, the moves, and the costumes, yours can compete with the best.
