Dance Recital

It went well. I made a little bitty mistake at the end, but asking around, nobody seemed to notice. I definitely flirted with the camera throughout the piece, hehe. Hopefully the photos will come out well. :D

Grinning Uncontrollably

M complimented me on my wonderful expressions when I dance. Little does she know, the reason for my expressions is that knowing she's there, watching and smiling and enjoying herself, makes me grin so unbelievably much. Dancing on its own makes me grin a lot too. Hooray for grinning and dancing! :D

We're performing again on Dec. 12. I'm supposed to be front and center -- probably the only time I'll ever get to stand in front, due to my height -- because the piece is too free-form and non-rhythmical in parts, and someone needs to lead and set the pace. I'm kind of intimidated. Dancing in the back is kind of nice, because half the time, nobody can see you, and you can relax and just have fun. But front and center, that's everybody, audience -and- fellow dancers, all looking at you at least some of the time, wondering what's going to happen next. Skeery.

Wish me luck! :3

Disorganized Dance Discourse

So I've been slacking off about writing about dancing. At least I haven't been slacking off about actually dancing! :D

I'm now taking 3 classes in 2 evenings, so whenever I get home on Tuesdays, I promptly fall face-down on the ground, moan and groan and whine a lot, and generally refuse to move until it's bed time. Wednesdays I now spend wishing I were unconscious until dance class, whereupon I magically rediscover my ability to move sometime during warm-ups and drills... and promptly lose it again after class.

I wish I knew more girls in the South Bay whom I can drag to this new Wednesday class, since there are like, only 3 or 4 of us there, and it's all sad and lonely.

I found one of the songs that we use during warm-ups. This makes me more excited than words can convey. I guessed that maybe the song was at least partly in French, so I imitated some of the lyrics by ear to my hubby, who said, "Yeah, we can find that," and we did. I spent the next day listening to the song on repeat and singing along in my nonexistent French. It made me happy. :)

Dance Blog

Tuesday I was really out of it, and didn't feel like I got too much out of dance class. In my brain, I know that moving around is good for me, but in my body, I was tired and disoriented. balmy_fool had to drive me to and from class, because I was feeling so out of it.

Wednesday was much better. I was able to drive myself to and from class, for starters. There were a ton of new people at the class, so we had to switch places with the other class and move to the bigger studio to avoid collisions during class. After warm-ups, we shimmied again, for about 10-15 minutes. It was exceedingly painful, but I feel like maybe my shimmies are getting better. The new steps in the choreography are pretty hard, but only because they're so damn fast. Hopefully with repetition will come speed and precision. :)

Dance Blog

Last night, we started warm-ups not with a routine, but with .... miles and figure 8's. *dies* My back hadn't recovered from the previous week's drills, and starting right off with that was... singularly painful. After that, we went through the normal warm-up routine, stretching, isolations, etc. The instructor had been mugged by a sushi bar on her way to class, so every time we did ab exercises, she got this adorably pained look on her face and quit after just a few repetitions. It was terribly cute. XD

Since we had a new person in class, we did introductions again. When we got to the new person, she drew a breath, and very calmly stated that her name was "----". I blinked, parsed, and was happy, but the instructor had this hilarious blank look of astonishment. After staring at the new person for a few heartbeats, she very tentatively asked the new person how to spell the name. How is it that every face she makes is so darned cute? It's driving me to distraction.

When introductions were done, we drilled tiny hip circles. As the instructor put it, the difference between this and other dance styles is that in other dance styles, you want people to look at your hip circles, whereas in this style, you want to pretend to be shy, hide behind your hands, and be all like "Oh noes! Please don't look at my hip circles! *circle circle circle*". >.>;;;; Well, at least it was adorable when she demonstrated. ^_^

After drills, we moved on to choreography, by which I mean, we did shimmies for-fucking-ever, and then the instructor forgot about 4 measures of choreography in the middle of the dance. Tonight I think we'll "relearn" that part of the dance. Maybe we'll even get to move on. We're really close to the end, so I'm pretty excited for that. :)

All in all, I'm finding that doing the moves superficially is not too hard, but looking good while doing it is damnably challenging. I am having a fabulous time with this. :D