/ Adamo Ciarallo
Adamo Ciarallo
Co-founder of The Blues Room, Adamo is the Italian master of musicality! He encourages you to be in the moment and truly connect to your partner and the music. His clear, concise (and often comical) teaching makes even complex things seem simple, and his passion for blues dance and music is infectious.
Adamo’s dance journey started a long time ago, when he spontaneously walked into a Rock ‘n’ Roll class and got hooked by his very first rock step. Soon after he discovered the Lindy Hop, Balboa and Blues, and he’s been dancing these beautiful dances ever since!
Adamo has an accredited qualification in teaching adults and there’s nothing more he loves than passing on his passion for blues dance to others. Together, Adamo and Vicci have been teaching blues dance for the past 12 years. They spent 5 years nurturing the blues scene in London where they successfully set up 5 weekly classes, 2 weekly social dances with live music, a buzzing monthly social with live music (which is still going strong today!), and started Europe’s first blues dance performance troupe. They moved to Valencia in 2016 where they taught weekly blues classes and one-off workshops for a selection of the Lindy Hop schools, and ran live music events.
In addition to growing local dance communities, Adamo has also co-founded The Blues Room online school, three annual festivals (ESpanish Blues Festival: Spring Edition, ESpanish Blues Festival: Winter Edition, and Good Time Blues Fest) and two intensive training events (Bluesology Teacher Training and The Jump).
Together, Adamo and Vicci have developed clear philosophies in how they approach the dance and how they teach, and are excited to share these thoughts with you!
As guests in a dance from another culture they are constantly learning and assessing how they can minimise the appropriation of the dance, aiming to respect and honour the roots of the dance through their learning and teaching.
Courses that feature Adamo
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300 Pounds of Joy
Full of latin rhythms and gritty saxophones! Add attitude to your dancing, and learn cool footwork and powerful shapes that will boost your confidence and bring you joy!
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Ballroom Blues
Explore the style of blues dance that developed in ballrooms, danced to more melodic styles of blues played by Big Bands during the Swing Era. Think travelling steps, elegant lines and momentum. COURSE AIMS By the end of this course…
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Basic Turns
Learn new moves and develop your leading and following skills with some simple turning variations. Add changes of speed and dynamics to your dancing and gain some essential partnering skills. COURSE AIMS By the end of this course you will…
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Catches
Add to your vocabulary, work on turning technique, create dynamics and improve your partnering skills. ‘Catches’ catch, absorb and redirect energy; they super versatile and some of our favourite moves! COURSE AIMS By the end of this course you will…
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Challenge 1: Pivot, Catch & Dip
For this challenge you need to feel confident with the following holds and techniques:
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Challenge 2: Catch & Spin
For this challenge you need to feel confident with catches. If you would like to brush up on your technique for catches we recommend taking the catches course and then coming back to this challenge.
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Challenge 3: Rotational Flow
For this challenge you need to feel confident with the “Whee No Arms” move from the OUR FAVOURITE MOVES course and with the Contra-body technique. Click below to review them if needed.
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Challenge 4: Our Favourite Sequence
This is one of favourite sequences to do! It feels so fluid and allows for lots of creativity with timing and dynamics… we hope you love it as much as we do. Enjoy!
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Challenge 5: Stretch & Frame
This challenge will test your ability to maintain your frame and react to the feeling of stretch between you and your partner. We have a whole course dedicated to ‘stretch’ and ‘frame’ in the Essential Skills category of courses, and…
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Close Embrace Intensive
Discover our top tips for making close embrace comfortable, effortless and magical! Improve your close embrace technique with a variety of exercises and new vocabulary.
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Contra-Body Adventure
This course is designed to give you exercises and drills to improve your contra-body movement, focussing on using contra-body to initiate rotations. All drills are practiced solo first, so if you don't have a partner to train with don't be…
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Dips & Tricks: Vol I
Hit the breaks, finish songs with style and add drama to your dancing with our ‘dips’ and ‘tricks’. There are moves at a range of levels, so what are you waiting for! Please make sure you watch the introduction before…
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Dips & Tricks: Vol II
Following on from the Dips & Tricks course we are bringing you part 2… more moves, more flash and more drama! Please make sure you watch the introduction before starting the classes as it includes important safety advice. COURSE AIMS…
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Four Corners Special
Play with your Four Corners and explore a whole heap of different ways to use it! Turn it, travel it, and spice it up in new ways! This is one of many blues idiom dances that is now often used…
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In The Swing Of It
Do you want fluid, effortless dances? Learn how to use the ‘swing’ to create and maintain flow in your dancing, transitioning smoothly between moves and improving connection with your partner. COURSE AIMS By the end of this course you will…
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Introduction to Blues
The perfect place to start! Get to grips with the basic principles of blues dance, learn to groove to the music solo and with a partner, work on moving through a variety of different partnered holds and develop your skills…
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Isolations
Blues dancing, like many other forms, thrives on subtlety. One of the best ways to create those captivating small movements is through isolations—the ability to move one part of your body while keeping the rest still. Our practice sessions focus…
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Jookin’ Blues
The term ‘jookin’ refers to a family of blues dances that developed in the Jook Joints in the Deep South of the USA. Jook Joints were/are small places, so there is a focus on body rhythms and solo body shaping…
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Jookin’ Moves
Discover a range of Jookin’ dances, and other moves with a shared aesthetic. ‘Jookin’ refers to a group of blues dances that originated in African American communities, danced in Jook Joints in the Mississippi Delta. COURSE AIMS By the end…
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Late Night Blues
It’s late… the music is slowing down… you’ve been dancing for hours and your legs are tired but you don’t want to stop. This is our favourite moment in a party! In this ‘late night blues’ course you will play…
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Latin Blues: Vol I
Welcome to the world of Latin blues! Identify and dance to three different rhythms, including the Afro-Cuban Habanera rhythm, popular in blues music throughout the 1950s but introduced in the late 1800s. St Louis Blues, published by W.C. Handy in…
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Mellow Down Easy
Enjoy this medium-fast tempo choreography to a wonderful rumba blues song. The routine is suitable for all levels, but be ready to jump, shake and wiggle!
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Our Favourite Moves
Show off on the dance floor with our favourite moves! You’ll see us dancing these moves when we dance socially and we wanted to share them with you. There are moves at a variety of levels using a range of…
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Practices
Practice makes progress! These practice sessions involve repetition—and for good reason. Whether you’re working on your timing, rhythm variations, or transitions, repetition is the key to building muscle memory and improving your overall technique. Here’s why repeating the same drills…
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Q&A Sessions
We get asked some fabulous questions by students, and we thought you might all be interested in hearing our answers! So here they are! Please note these are our personal answers, based on our own personal experiences. They are not…
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Rhythm Toolkit
Your introduction to common rhythms & timings found in blues music. Identify and dance to the rhythms and learn how to improvise with them so you and your partner can have a wonderfully interesting rhythmic dialogue. COURSE AIMS By the…
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Side By Side
Discover our favourite side-by-side variations. This is a very versatile hold; use it to travel around the floor and to connect turns to other moves. A simple but effective way to keep building up your pot of moves! COURSE AIMS…
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Slow Drag
Learn the Slow Drag, the oldest known partnered blues dance. This is a close embrace dance, all about about spending time with your partner and enjoying holding on to each other and moving together to the music.
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Stretch & Frame
Deepen your understanding of ‘stretch’ and ‘frame’ and how they apply to blues dance. Improve your partnering skills, develop essential technique and have safe dances forever more! COURSE AIMS By the end of this course you will be able to:
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Swinging Triplets
Make your dancing more dynamic by responding to the swinging eighth-note triplet rhythm, the base of any ‘slow blues’ or ‘shuffle blues’. Get the rhythm in different body parts & learn some exciting new moves. COURSE AIMS By the end…
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Texas Shuffle Vol. I
Dive into the Texas Shuffle. Learn the fundamentals of this fun, slotted dance, improve your stretch and pull technique and get shufflin’!
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The Blues Shuffle
Discover new ways to respond to the classic Blues Shuffle rhythm with fun footwork, solo moves and partnered variations. The shuffle is more than a rhythm… it’s part of blues music history. Legend has it that the shuffle rhythm impersonated…
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Top Tips
Discover our pearls of wisdom about all those ‘small’ things that make or break your dancing. Gain a deeper understanding of terminology we use throughout the other courses and classes, and take time to focus on the details.
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Transitions & Flow: Solo
We find that adding swing to our dancing helps to maintain a flow of energy, creating smooth and easy transitions between moves. In this course we share our idea of swing with you, exploring side to side, backwards, and rotational…
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Transitions & Flow: Partnered
Maintaining a clear flow within our own body enables us to communicate more clearly with our partner when we choose to dance with someone else. This gives us freedom to improvise and create magic in the moment with our partner,…
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Warm Ups
Warm up for your practice and develop muscle memory with these warm ups, drills and exercises. Follow along with us as we guide you through step by step.
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We Just Want to Dance
Choreographed during the first Covid lockdown, this dance is designed to get everyone around the world dancing! A chance for us to forget our troubles and dance!
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Latin Blues: Vol II
Continue your exploration of Latin rhythms in blues music. Following on from our Latin Blues: Vol I course, this course recaps the Habanera rhythm and introduces you to four new rhythms: the tresillo, rumba, cinquillo and son clave. By the…
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Chicago Triple: Vol I
Let us share our way of dancing the Chicago Triple; an idiomatic approach to dancing to medium and up tempo shuffle blues rhythms. Full of rhythmic footwork, dynamics, compression, stretch, a swinging feel and lots of triple-ing fun.