In my limited experience enjoying dance as a beginner, I've had a few eye-opening moments which really helped me improve & understand just what the heck dance is about. I've collected few of these observations into this short post for the enjoyment of other beginning dancers out there wondering what they don't know they don't know.
1. Understand the role of muscle memory
When you're first putting your body through a new movement pattern, it will feel awkward and unnatural. That's just the way it is, and it's that way for everybody - even the most coordinated among us. So when you feel awkward trying out new dance moves, take comfort in knowing that that feeling is totally normal.
As you do these movements while they're still new to you, the front part of your brain is focusing on them. By repeating those awkward movements over and over again, you're training your muscle memory so that you can apply less focus to them over time.
As the primary motions of the dance become more natural and engrained in muscle memory, you can then take your attention to focusing on other things. Still early on, you'll want to move focus from the general / large body movements (e.g. hips & core) to the small & more fine-tuned body movements (e.g. hands & face). As more and more of the dance comes firmly under your control, you can focus on the more fun & creative things - being creative & expressive, being more in tune with the music, and engaging with a dance partner if you have one.
2. Dance in front of a mirror, and then not in front of a mirror
The idea here is to separate what you're focusing on at the beginning of learning new moves vs. later on. When you're first practicing new steps, you'll want to take in how it looks - this is where the mirror comes in. Use the mirror to track what your body is doing and explicitly guide your body into the patterns of the dance. You'll be engaging your front brain in this part and muscle memory won't yet know what to do.
Once you've spent time focusing on how a dance looks, you'll then want to take the mirror away in order to focus on how it feels. You won't have a mirror out in the real world after all - since our bodies and minds learn associatively, you'll want to practice without becoming dependent on the mirror. In this phase you'll focus on what it feels like to go through the movements you've spent time practicing in the mirror. Exploring what a dance feels like in each part of your body - what your hips, legs, arms, & face are doing - will let you take greater control and ownership of the dance, which opens the way to greater creativity and individual flourish.
3. Film yourself
Many folks may not do this just by being unaware of its benefits. Filming youself lets you see what you'll look like as others would see you - it's the only way to really understand what you look like as you dance. This helps tremendously in identifying what to improve on.
When looking at yourself in the mirror, you're only seeing yourself from a fixed angle while your body moves - this does not match the experience of taking in a recording of yourself dancing. There's also the fact that the act of looking at yourself in the mirror changes your dancing.
It may feel uncomfortable to see yourself dancing - similar to how listening to a recording of yourself talk can be uncomfortable. You might not like what you see. But it's better to know so that you can tackle head on what you need to improve.
4. Know this YouTube hack
This one's a special case if you're ever learning dance from someone on YouTube (or other video settings where this hack applies). You have the ability to change playback speed of videos on YouTube to 50% or 25% of full speed. This can be tremendously useful if full speed is just way too fast and you want to break down a dance's movements slowly and piece by piece.
That's it! Those are just a few tips which I've learned getting off the ground in the early stages of my dance journey. Hopefully they helped or were interesting - if you have any tips of your own, I encourage you to share them.