Learn to dance well

that dancing is much more popular in Europe than here in America.
Sweet.

Last dance class of the semester was on Sunday. I’m definitely much better than I was at the beginning of the semester, especially in standard. I still don’t know how to do Samba or West Coast Swing. I’d especially like to learn West Coast Swing, since (East Coast) Swing is my favorite dance. I would also really like to learn more Quickstep, American Waltz, Foxtrot (American and International), and Tango (American, International, and Argentinian). Wonder if I’ll get to learn any in Italy. {Shrug.} Anyways, College Night {read: evening ballroom party held every other week for the colleges in the DC area} is on Saturday, so if I can make it through the rest of this week, I can go to one more ballroom bash before leaving the big city for my tiny hometown then for Rome.

First, the shameless plug:
CONGRATULATIONS to all the members of the GW Competition Ballroom Dance Team for their performance(s) in DCDI (DC Dance Inferno, a DC college dance competition) this weekend! {thunderous applause}

In honor of DCDI, which lasted this entire weekend, this week’s practices are devoted to fun things {read: illegal for competition}. Tonight’s open practice was for dips and drops, along with a random lift that the couple who were teaching (who dance at the highest level in college competition) made up on the spot.

Dips and drops. With a whole bunch of novices {myself included}. I thought I was going to die.

Behold, I am not dead! My knees, however, may decide to run away during the night, they’re about to give out on me, hence I am sitting down. Dips and drops are not easy on the female knees.

Lesson from the night: I can do lifts, dips, and drops. In fact, I can do them fairly well, for this reason: I am rather small. Guys like doing lifts, dips, and drops with small girls. They feel strong. Holding me with one arm is a lot easier than holding some other girls with one arm. Hence one relatively big (in the tall and muscular sense) guy was enjoying lifting and dipping and dropping me, and making up his own lifts and dips and drops with me, after being put with larger girls the rest of the night (pairing was somewhat done by matching body types).

So I learned how to do sexy things tonight. I’m still scared for my life doing them most of the time, but I can do them. Must do them in moderation, though, to avoid killing my knees again.

Ok, so I think I now feel confident enough in my salsa abilities to say I can salsa dance. Last night actually went all right – it wasn’t akward, and he didn’t try anything sketchy, and I didn’t have to do one of those akward “I’m sorry but” speeches.

The dancing…well…our mistake was in asuming that “Basic lesson” meant “This is the basic step for salsa: Quick, quick, slow”. Instead, the lesson was full of people who’d apparently been taking lessons at this restaurant for like two months, so “Basic lesson” meant “Learn this routine which would be really comlicated if you hadn’t been taking lessons for the past two months”, then “Intermediate lesson” was “Let’s add another more complicated routine to the first one”, and “Advanced lesson” was “Just in case that was too easy, here’s more insanely complex routine to add on to that!”. Since the extent of our salsa was the basic step, a basic turn, and the cross-body lead (basically, rotating to face another direction, done in a sexy fashion)...well, we were a bit lost. I’m a pretty good follower, especially once I have a vague idea of what I’m supposed to be doing, so I kinda faked my way through some of it with some of the other guys there…but my poor guy friend was lost. We ended up just picking a couple of the cool moves from the routine and drilling them, so we learned them but not the routine, and then just dancing with what we knew. One of the Latin guys who was sitting near where we were dancing got up to help us a few times, then applauded us when we didn’t suck as badly. He was friendly. Turns out he grew up like a town away from where my friend grew up in Florida, so they bonded over soccer memories or something like that.

Anyways, I can salsa. I’m not nearly as good as any of the other women there were, or as anyone for whom salsa and Latin dancing are a part of their culture, but I can hold my own and dance without a guy and not feel totally stupid, and I can follow random stuff that guys pull pretty well.

So I feel I can say that I CAN salsa, cha cha, and swing well. Great. Now I just need to get the standard dances down, and I’ll be good.

Apparently I’m going salsa dancing tomorrow night?

That’s gonna be interesting…this guy who’s in ballroom class, who I went to the Halloween ball with, called me and asked if I wanted to go with “him and his friend”. Only he “hasn’t talked to his friend in a couple days and doesn’t know what’s going on with him”. Hmm. Interesting. I haven’t really told him anything about my love life, so I don’t think he knows that I’m in this horrible I-don’t-know-what state of affairs with my love life (which yes, I will get around to writing about eventually), and that I’m not really available – I am but I’m not…yeah. I hope I don’t have to do an akward “I hope I haven’t been leading you on but…” talk. Those suck. Oh, this is also the guy who I’ve been calling by the wrong name ALL SEMESTER and only found out about that last week, since he never corrected me and was responding to the name I was calling him. Can you say, “Oops. Akward!”?

Yeah…so this is gonna be interesting. Why did I say yes? I have class on Friday morning, and work all day after that. I know I’m gonna be tired tomorrow night. Why did I say yes? Damn obsession with ballroom. It sucks you in. It’s dangerous. Ugh. So…yeah. This should be…interesting.

Oh, yeah, and I don’t have any idea where we’re going. Apparently the place is in Arlington. The only thing I know in Arlington is the cemetary, which is NOT where I’d like to go dancing. My guy friend’s never been to the club, which apparently could either be completely fine or just “full of sketchy creepy Mexicans”, as he put it. I have no idea. I hate not knowing stuff like that.

I know I keep saying this is gonna be interesting, but that’s really all I can say about it. I really like the guy as a friend but I’m really not interested in taking it any farther and I don’t know what’s he’s thinking and I don’t want to hurt his feelings and I suck at salsa and I don’t want to spend a night in a club full of sketchy Latinos or sketchy anybodies for that matter and all I really want to do is be boring and sit in my room in my pajamas with a cup of hot cocoa and a book and ahhhhhhhhh I need to go to sleep now.

Going to practice space tonight (open practice for any paid members of the ballroom dance club, basically). Yeah, that’ll be interesting, seeing as how it’s Halloween…anyways. Kate told me she’d help me with fan, which I am quite excited about. Fan’s a move in Cha cha and Rhumba that’s sexy and looks awesome…or it would look sexy and awesome if I could just get it. There’s these funny things you’re supposed to do with your hips on funny counts that I can’t get…they tried to teach it in the classes, but I didn’t get it right away in the class two weeks ago, then I missed the class last week when I guess they worked on it more, and so I couldn’t do it yesterday in class either. Oh well. Kate, in her benevolence and magnanimity, not to mention her awesome dance skills, is going to tutor me. If I’m lucky, I might be able to also get her to explain hustle to me, or help my standard.

Tonight was the Ballroom Dance Society’s Halloween Costume Ball. I had a blast! But oh, Lord, do my feet hurt!

So I got to dance with a whole lot of people, and to a whole lot of dances. Some I’m definitely a lot better at than others.

Dance rundown of the night:
Swing – My favorite, and my best dance. It’s probably my favorite cause its my best, or vice versa, or something like that. I learned a couple new moves tonight too. Fun!
Jive – Basically just like swing, only faster, so I’m not bad at it if I can stay on the beat.
West Coast Swing – No f~ing clue.
Cha Cha – probably my best Latin dance. I’m not bad, I just need to be in synch with my partner, or he needs to be a strong leader. If I don’t know what he’s doing, then it all just goes to hell.
Rhumba – I like rhumba! I’m not that advanced in it, but I’m really not that bad. As long as my lead knows what he’s doing.
Salsa – Not bad, but not my best Latin dance. Could use work. I wouldn’t last long in a salsa club.
Samba – Umm, I suck at samba. I haven’t even gotten the basic step pattern down. Needs work.
Hustle – Definitely not one of my strong dances. I don’t quite get how the basic is counted, or how the beat works, so that messes me up. I just don’t “get” it yet. Needs work. I’m better than I was before tonight though.
Tango – I’m MUCH better after tonight than I was before, although I don’t know what version of tango (American or International) I was doing…still needs lots of work.
Foxtrot – I now know how to do it, whereas before tonight I had no clue. Still needs a vast amount of work. Like the tango, I don’t know what version of foxtrot it is that I was doing…
Quickstep – Not completely sure what I’m doing. I can pretty much handle the basic, not sure about turning corners (same for all the standard dances), don’t know anything but the basic – needs work.
Waltz – I need a really strong lead to waltz decently. Needs much work.
Polka – Skipped the one polka they played at the end. I’m a horrible excuse for a Western Pennsylvanian, I generally fake my way through polkas by skipping around the room.

I think that’s it. So yeah. I danced. A lot. With a lot of different people. It was great fun! But my feet hurt soooo much right now.

On a side note…I noticed tonight that my shoes are falling apart. I shouldn’t be surprised, I’ve had them for almost 4 years now, and they’re really the only shoes I dance in. But that makes me sad. I’m to cheap to buy new shoes, especially ballroom shoes. I guess I have been abusing them lately with the whole ballroom thing.

Edit:
Forgot a couple dances.
Viennese Waltz – I can do it, if I have a strong and patient lead.
Lindy – Somebody showed me how to do the basic step. Do I remember it? No. Could I really do it when he showed me? No. But I know what it looks like.

So I just came from ballroom dance class #1 of the semester. There were a whole lot of people there. Not unexpectedly, there were many more girls than there were guys, so, since I’ve done some ballroom before and vaguely know what I’m doing (at least compared to people who’ve never done it before) I ended up going through a gender identity crisis and being a guy for the duration of the class. Fun times.

But anyways…I was thinking. Maybe I should redefine this goal. I say this because I realized dancing “well” is completely relative. I dance well compared to my boyfriend (not that I love him any less for it), but compared to Kate, who’s won ballroom competitions, or to the rest of the competition ballroom team, I do not dance well at all. I’m sure I dance well enough that I could impress many of my friends back home. Stick me in a room full of people who really know what they’re doing, however…you get the picture. It also depends on who I’m dancing with – I consider myself a pretty good follower, so if I know the basic step to whatever dance and my partner knows what he’s doing, I can get by all right.

Anyways, the point being, I might redefine this goal, because as it stands, I don’t know at what point I would consider myself a good enough dancer to mark this complete. I’m not planning on joining the competition team, so I won’t be getting the extra lessons that make the people on the comp team look so damn good, so I really shouldn’t compare myself to them…but I can’t help it. I think part of “accomplishing” this goal is that I would really like to learn to dance well with a partner, specifically, my boyfriend, but I haven’t come up with a good enough bribe to get him to take more lessons with me. I dunno. Point of this whole rant being, this goal may be rewritten in the near future.

Last night the ballroom dance club held a salsa night, where they gave basic lessons for about an hour then put on music, free for whoever wanted to come. I went with my friend Kate and a few other friends. I still remembered enough to get by and be slightly better than the people who’d never done it before. I was even able to lead a little bit dancing with one of my girl friends (though I’m a pretty bad and boring lead, since I only know how to lead like one turn).

Classes start tomorrow. Hoorah!

Went to the first meeting of the ballroom dance society today. Of course, I went mostly because my dear friend Kate threatened me with bodily harm if I didn’t show…but I went. There were a whole lot of people there, actually, I think about three times what the club expected. Anyways, lessons are on Sunday afternoons, and $50 gets you a semesters worth of both Latin and Standard. That’s a really good price, especially considering you get about 8 weeks of lessons with a really good coach (top 10 nationally in Standard, I think). So I think I’ll go. Besides, I think Kate’s helping teach the standard, and there’s that whole threat of bodily harm that I’d rather not push her on. (Don’t get me wrong, I love Kate to death, she just enjoys threatening people with bodily harm.) So yeah. More dance lessons.

Which means I’ll be even more out of sync with my otherwise-oh-so-wonderful boyfriend whenever (i.e. if ever) we should try to dance together.

Wonder how I could convince him to take ballroom lessons over the semester, especially when he has no time or money to spare…and he still thinks that getting too much into ballroom would be too feminine for an oh-so-masculine guy like himself…