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In order to take social dancing to the next level, a Lead should reduce the use of named “Rueda” moves to a bare minimum and focus more and more on improvised, music driven flows of basic figures in ever changing combinations. Most basic figures are only one count of Eight and many of them have a second half with a lot of options.

The smaller the building blocks we have, the richer and the more interesting dances we can compose. A Lead should shift his focus from relatively long moves to the shortest possible combinations of basic figures, the “gold nuggets”, mostly just pairs and triplets of basic figures.

In this tutorial we focus on the Panqué (Pancake) basic figure, called Siete (“7”) in the Miami Rueda tradition. Pancake works well with Coca-Cola and Rodeo. Most Leads only start Pancake from Guapea, but it can be started from almost anywhere out of the blue, from Dile Que No, from a Paseo walk, from Coca-Cola, etc.

Pancake is easy in Rueda de Casino because both the Lead and the Follow hear it being called. It is difficult to lead in social dancing because it is unusual and not common. Either the Lead leads is too soft and the Follow doesn’t get it, or too hard and she is thrown out of balance. It takes a lot of experience to lead it just right.

Video #1 is from a Practica Training Session with me and Mona, Copenhagen, 2022. It shows three examples of the the “Pancake, Coca-Cola, Rodeo” triplet.