Jesse Lopez is a US Open Champion and the founder of BLC. He's been competing on the WCS circuit since 2011 and teaching since 2013 — accumulating more than 3,400 private lessons taught across 28 cities along the way.
Along the way he developed a framework that treats West Coast Swing like a spoken language — a set of vocabulary and grammar that students can study, drill, and use to improvise. The Body Language Curriculum is the formalized version of that framework. It's how he teaches every private lesson today.
Jesse teaches privately in Kansas City and online globally. He also runs the BLC Teacher Training cohort each spring, mentoring working instructors in the methodology.
He believes WCS retention is broken because the dance is taught as a list of patterns instead of as a language. Most of his work is aimed at fixing that.
High-context, language-based. Expect to leave with vocabulary you can actually use the next time you social dance — not just a memorized routine.
These are Jesse's own videos — uploaded by him, organized into his own categories. Not the official BLC curriculum. Link to Jesse to access all 86 drills.
Teaching tips, event recaps, and curriculum thinking. Linked students get them as notifications too.
A drift-y anchor is almost never about footwork — it's about momentum management on counts 3-4. Here's how to diagnose yours in under a minute and what to drill once you do.
Three days, four prelims, and one finals podium. A breakdown of how the cohort prepped, and the one rep block I'm going to drop from next semester's intensives.
Most beginners don't quit because the dance is hard. They quit because no one ever told them which thing to work on next. The five-question checklist I use to answer that for every new student.