March 2026 Newsletter
Here is our second newsletter for 2026.
Here is my second correspondence from our new temporary home in Grange. We have settled in, and our old house is now contracted and awaiting settlement. Hopefully we will be in our new apartment in June.
Information below on:
2026 Regular Socials
Our Teaching Philosophy
Artificial Intelligence
See you on the dance floor,
Liz & Peter Heath and the Instructor Team
2026 Regular Socials
Socials are an integral part of our line dance organisation. They provide an opportunity for our dancers to test out their knowledge and skills, check out their options to stretch themselves in a higher level, and meet other members of our community from different regional areas.
Following the survey run last social, we will be continuing with the same format as last year, with an afternoon tea break at around 3pm, so bring a small plate to share, and your own coffee cup if you want the free tea and coffee we provide.
The program is made up from requests from those attending. There have been an increase in the new members of our community attending the socials, which is wonderful. We have adjusted the programme to accommodate this with an increased number of easy level dances on the program.
The social dates for this Year are:
Sunday 15th March 1:30pm to 5:00pm
Sunday 14th June 1:30pm to 5:00pm
Sunday 12th July 1:30pm to 5:00pm
Sunday 16th August 1:30pm to 5:00pm
Sunday 20th September 1:30pm to 5:00pm
Sunday 25th October 1:30pm to 5:00pm
Sunday 29th November 1:30pm to 5:00pm
The Address is: West Croydon and Kilkenny RSL, 19 Rosetta St, West Croydon.
Dancing starts at 1.30pm and concludes at 5pm at a cost of $15 (cash only). The program is run by request, and everyone gets a request form when they enter, to nominate 5 dances they would like to do. We try to ensure that you get at least one of those, but we only do about 5 level 6+ dances during the session, so don’t just ask for really hard ones (or lots of unusual ones), or you could miss out altogether.
We have a break about half way through, where we share a combined afternoon tea for 20 minutes. Please bring a small plate of food to share with your fellow dancers. Also bring a coffee cup if you wish to take advantage of the free tea and coffee provided. We will have minimal fridge space, and a pie warmer, but no oven, so please don’t bring food that needs cooking or defrosting. We feel this is good way to assist people to mix and chat. Doors will open 30 minutes before the starting time.
Our Teaching Philosophy
Line dancing has suddenly become visibly popular again in the media and online. This has led to a plethora of new classes opening, run by “instructors” that have little or no involvement in the pre-existing line dance fraternity (nor line dancing experience).
The “new” way to teach seems to be relying on the customers looking at online videos on “U Tube” and “Tic Toc” and learning the dances there, then just “doing” them in these pop up classes. This makes the steps open to individual interpretation, making the teachers lazy, and the dance floor chaotic with lack of consistency of technique and knowledge, all hidden behind a veil of styling and variations.
The choreography is a mixture of plagiarized classic dances that have been renamed or set to “newer” music, and new routines made up by all manner of would be influencers from around the globe. There is only a smattering of dances that are done the same and named the same in both new and old “line dance communities”.
When dancers are young, agile and fit, these methods will work for a while, but they have their limitations and dangers.
I predict many of the health and welfare issues of the early days of line dancing in the 90’s are going to reappear in the coming months.
We at “Line Dancers of South Australia” are going to continue what we know is a healthy, socially inclusive and morally supportive method of presenting line dancing to the community.
We have well trained instructors, teaching properly researched choreography, utilising healthy body mechanic techniques, acknowledging and being true to the choreography origins while encouraging everyone to succeed, not just the mentally and physically agile ones.
We have a healthy mix of new dances and classic dances from our 30+ years of teaching here in South Australia and around the world. We continue to network with the international line dance community to keep our activity consistent with the other professionals world wide.
We also have a well researched method of grading the level of the choreography we teach, to enable people to work their way into the line dance community at a speed they feel comfortable with. This avoids the sink or swim mentality that is found with groups that trust the levels specified on the dance sheets.
Most choreography levels on the dance sheets are specified to encourage exposure for the influencer/choreographer, rather than a realistic measure of the dance complexity. Teachers are looking for new dances for their beginners and are tricked into teaching dances that contain non beginner concepts.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming the new buzz word. It is starting to work its influence into everyday life, and bringing many of the things we considered trustworthy into question.
The term “Artificial Intelligence” is attempting to describe computers that think for themselves. In reality, at this stage, this is not correct. It refers to computers that have access to large amounts of filtered information at very high speeds to enable them to respond to any question or task in “real time”. They do have the ability to learn from each of their tasks and store results, so they can improve their turn around time and maybe accuracy. They are only as accurate as the information they have been programmed with however. Give them bad or skewed information, and they will provide bad or skewed results.
They can also be set to do tasks that would take a fraction of the time that a human, or groups of humans would take, due to their high processing power. This is done at a cost in electrical, physical footprint (to house the computers) and water resources (for cooling) for their “Data Processing Centres”.
An example of the output from AI is the creation of the following video “Cats Line Dancing” (the link is a safe U Tube address). It is really funny, especially if you are a cat lover...
https://youtu.be/HPg8kb57Ids
As the computers become more and more “clever”, it is getting harder and harder to distinguish between reality and fantasy.
We used to be able to trust that politicians, advertisers and journalists had standards that they must adhere to, or the “establishment” would hold them to account. Now we cant trust any of them to be based in actual reality (they get tricked too, or deliberately mislead), nor that the establishment is even watching or supervising (the establishment has its own agenda).
I wonder where we are heading....