In May of this year, I called to sign my fiance (now husband) Mike and myself up for our free first lesson. My husband was not happy that I signed us up and grunted "like we have time for this", but with lessons until 9:15 PM, we were able to fit it into our schedule even with our ridiculous Bay Area commutes. We showed up to our first free lesson with Ron and were doing multiple types of dances by the end of those 45 min. With our wedding a little over a month, we signed up for the 5 lesson wedding package. The package is not cheap, but Arthur Murray is a really solid dance studio so we decided to give it a chance. On our first lesson, we gave Ron our wedding song and by our second lesson, he had fully choreographed a first dance rumba routine for us. When we completed our wedding dance package, we signed on to monthly 10-class packages to continue our lessons before and after our wedding.
We were living in Dublin, CA at the time, but got married outside my hometown of Portland, OR so we did not have a chance to practice in our wedding shoes until 2 nights before our wedding. We ran through our routine in my parents' front yard where I used to play as a kid, and that is a wonderful memory I have no pictures of, but that which I hope never to forget.
On our wedding day, we were excited to show off our moves! Only a handful of friends and my mom knew we had taken lessons. Mike's parents had no clue and his mom was blown away. I was so excited that our first dance was a huge hit and was more than just swaying. I have been dancing my whole life and I really did not want a middle school dance first dance.
Mike thoroughly enjoyed our wedding dance lessons and we continued dance lessons until we moved to Connecticut in early October of this year. Over the course of our 5 months at Arthur Murray, we received lessons with Ron and Melisandra. Both are outstanding. Ron and Melisandra choreographed a second demo dance for us and Melisandra choreographed a wonderful Merengue/Salsa/Bachata demo that we were able to perform on our final day at Arthur Murray. In addition to ballroom and latin style dancing, the instructors of Arthur Murray sometimes put together different formations that you can sign up for as well. These can be different styles of dancing. I was part of a hip hop formation lead by Cimone September-October and it was also a lot of fun. Since we have moved to Connecticut, we have not gotten back into dancing and we both miss it very much. We are hoping to see if we can fit it back in once our lives have settled down and we have settled into some sort of routine.
A hesitation prospective students may have about Arthur Murray is the cost. It is certainly a very expensive dance studio, but it is worth every penny. As mentioned above, I have been dancing most of my life, but this was the first professional dance studio I had attended. You do not learn one or even two styles of dance. They have a very extensive repertoire of ballroom and latin dance styles and you will learn them all. When building your program, you can indicate which styles you are most interested in learning as well as how proficient you would like to be (for Mike, he wanted to learn to be able to identify the dance style for every song and for me, I wanted to look like a pro on Dancing with the Stars... one was more reasonable than the other). When we walked into Arthur Murray in May, Mike had never really danced before and I knew some waltz, swing, and some hip hop as well as having grown up doing loads Scandinavian folk dancing. When we left on October 13, 2017, we had learned at least the basics for waltz, rumba, tango, foxtrot, east coast swing, salsa, hustle, some argentine tango, bachata, some samba, and merengue. At our last lesson, we tested out of rumba, foxtrot, and east coast swing (graduated from Bronze I to Bronze II for those!).
The studio quickly makes you feel like family. Everyone learns your name, welcomes you when you arrive and leave, and are happy to show you the basics or play around with more complicated moves during the group parties. Leaving the Livermore Arthur Murray was as hard as leaving all of our friends because even though we'd only been going there for 5 months, all of the instructors felt like really good friends.
I docked Arthur Murray one star because as wonderful as everyone at the studio is, they can be very pushy about getting you to use (and thus need to buy) lots of lessons. I received many phone calls from different members of the Livermore Arthur Murray team to tell me that a slot had opened in so-and-sos schedule on such-and-such day and they wanted to give Mike and me the opportunity to snag that spot before someone else did. We already had a lesson scheduled, so this would either be trying to get us to double up on lessons that day or do private lessons multiple days a week. Over time, these requests weaned, so they do learn what you can manage. read more