My name is Adam and I want to tell you about my experience of learning with Simply Dancing Partners.

Watching Strictly Come Dancing a few years ago I noticed that Anton du Beke, despite being about my age, was slim and had superb posture – and he looked like he was having fun. I decided I wanted to learn to dance.

After lots of online research (and one awful group lesson with a generic dance teaching company) I came across Simply Dancing Partners. The owner, Jenni Kravitz, invited my wife and I to come and watch a class in progress, it looked fun and the couples waltzing were very good - we signed up. Our teacher was an excellent professional dancer and we made good progress over a few weeks.

Then Covid struck. It was pretty apparent that no one was going to be dancing, but Jenni came up with a solution. She pared us up with a really lovely professional dancer called Elza who gave us lessons over Zoom. Of course, that isn’t the ideal way to learn to dance but we had a lot of fun, and learned enough to impress a friend’s dance group when we joined them for their New Year’s Eve dance after lockdown ended.

With my wife becoming ever busier we took the decision that I should learn on my own, particularly to improve my leading skills, so I signed up to dance with a professional partner with Simply Dancing Partners.  Joining this class has been a revelation. You learn so much when your partner knows what they are doing! Instead of treading on each other’s toes my partner gently corrects what I’m doing, takes time to explain the intricacies of the step and patiently unpicks my bad habits. You learn fast this way and it gives you enormous confidence. As a man you really appreciate what is required from you as a leader. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to learn Ballroom and Latin dancing. The classes are friendly and fun, no one feel embarrassed and no one is made to feel uncomfortable or foolish – I really look forward to them.

About a year ago I was lucky enough to run into Anton – I told him how much I loved dancing and that he had been the inspiration for it, he was exactly as charming as you would expect!