The birthday dance

For about a year and a half I have been seeing "birthday dances" where leaders or followers, as the case may be, take turns dancing with the the birthday person.
Am I ready to take to the floor? Step up to the lead for the birthday girl? Be observed (judged?) by EVERYONE in the hall, as if in a performance?

So this time the birtday girl is a friend who "used" to dance with me, but for a while now has been dancing only with the "best" leaders (see my previous blog on "the vanishing intermediate dancer"). I stopped asking her a while back after sensing some reluctance. So now is my chance to show her how much I have improved! I take a deep breath and I step to the middle of the floor, asserting my right to the "30 seconds of fame". She smiles and seems surprised but accepting. We start to dance and I realize that I can't focus. I feel the eyes of everyone on me. We move and then I hear the dreaded word.. "oops"! I suddenly realize I am not sure where her weight is... Did everyone see the misstep? The next leader appears behind her. I gladly swivel my friend toward him and quickly walk back into the crowd of onlookers... looking for a deep hole to crawl into. They are still looking at the dancers. I feel no accusatory eyes pointed at me. Maybe nobody noticed. Later I think of apologizing to her... but I don't. I also realize that I will not ask her to dance again for a least a few more months.

As I am leaving for the evening a male friend tells me that he has seen a big imnprovement in my dance. This surprises me so much that I don't probe further (was he referring to my birthday dance?) ... so I just smile, thank him, and hope again that nobody noticed the misstep...

My first private lesson

I finally decided to start taking some private lessons. I feel that I have enough "steps" down to make my dance reasonably interesting, and I generally get good feedback about my musicality, but I know that my "style", posture and technique are lacking.

I approached my first private with a great deal of apprehension. I generally absolutely hate dancing with "the teacher". This is because I feel I cannot simply be myself while I know that my dance is being dissected. So, I tried very hard to put the teacher "thing" out of my mind and told myself that I would simply dance as if I had just invited this unknown woman... Fortunately this is exactly what she asked me to do right off the bat, and it worked! It was not my best dance, but it was close enough, I felt, to what I normally do.

So I waited anxiously for "the verdict". Good news and bad news. The good news is that the "simple" stuff I do, including my subtle movements guided by the music, felt very good to her (pfew!!..), so that's something I could keep doing and "make even very advanced dancers happy". On the other hand, when I ventured into more elaborate movements some things didn't work quite right for her. She felt a lack of ease and smoothness. Basically she felt she had to interrupt the "pleasure" of the dance and, at least temporarily, shift her attention to reading what I was trying to do. It would be great if these kinds of transitions didn't have to happen...

The prescription? We would "start over" from the basic stuff I do well and slowly add complexity while making sure that the transitions are smooth and my technique is correct. It was excruciating to dance while consciously eliminating most of the stuff that I have come to consider the bread and butter of my dance... but it has been an interesting and certainly useful exercise. We'll see where this takes me. BTW, I think the teacher was absolutely wonderful.