BachataBits uses simplified presentations of poses to give you a quick impression of how the dancer looks.

Before diving into the visual details, it is helpful to understand when these poses actually happen in the dance.

When do these poses occur?

BachataBits simplifies the complex dance of bachata to let you focus on the structure of your moves. This simplified system shows pose illustrations that are snapshots of the dancers at multiples of 4 beats (counts 4 and 8).

These poses serve as a "decision point" in the dance, where leaders have a vast range of options to lead different moves. It is easy to memorize options tied to a certain body position at a specific beat.

Remember that the preparation of your move has to happen a couple beats earlier, so the follow can react to your move of choice. You have to decide ahead what move you want to lead next and perform the preparation accordingly.

How to read the illustrations?

The intention behind the illustrations is to provide a "good guess" of what the pose looks like and ensure it's identifiable. They are not meant to explain every detail about the pose, as they are simplified views.

There are a few key conventions for each pose. Let's go through each of them.

Annotations

An illustration of two people can often look complex and difficult to interpret, as there are inevitably areas obscured by the dancers' bodies. For this reason, all poses are displayed by showing a single person.

Annotations are a way of explaining how the connections between the two dancers are made — specifically, which body parts are touching. You might recognize the following image as the basic open position taught in the first bachata class.

These illustrations show what each individual hand looks like. The shape is meant to resemble a hand, and the small "stem" indicates which arm it refers to. For a right arm, the "stem" is on the right side, and vice versa for the left.

As an example, this makes the following illustrations a bit easier to distinguish when the follow is in the hammerlock pose:

Besides hand connections, there is a third annotation type to depict a touch with any body part other than the hand. Even if the lead is also touching the follow, that corresponding touch is not indicated, to simplify the illustration:

Viewpoint

All poses are displayed from the viewpoint of the other dancer. While this is straightforward for front-facing basic poses, here are a few other examples:

Role

Given that only a single person is depicted, sometimes it is the lead, not the follow, who is shown to best identify the position.

In this case, the colors are reversed: the dancer (the lead) wears a blue top, and the touch annotations are red.