We set off for the Gumbo Dancesport Championships in 12 days.  It must be time to start obsessing about getting ready.  This will be our first time flying to a comp.  It’s gonna be a major troop movement.  We are dancing in some events where costumes are allowed, and some events where they aren’t, so I have to decide about taking my gowns and whether to check them or try to carry them onto what’s likely to be a wee little aircraft.  Last year I bought this practice dress for Smooth and I just got an outfit (this top and this skirt) for Rhythm, so I will be pretty well fixed without gowns too.  As a fan of packing light, I’m tempted not to take the gowns, but I don’t know yet.

At this point it’s much more fun to obsess about packing and preparations than to really focus on any possible shortcomings in our dancing.  As always, we haven’t practiced as much as we’d like or taken as many lessons as we’d hoped for, but we have our new routines and we are pretty good at selling a performance.  Plus, we are both really up for a vacation, so we want to make sure we enjoy this trip regardless of our placements.  Dressing up, pinning on the number, and putting on the show is half the fun.  Being in a new place will be the other half.

Not that a ribbon or two wouldn’t be nice.

We just got word yesterday that this year’s SouthernStar Mid-Summer Classic has been canceled due to “multiple factors beyond [the organizers'] control.”  It’s hard not to wonder what happened, given that the date had been scheduled long ago and the organizers were already promoting the competition.  We’re sad to be missing the comp this year.  It is lots of fun and very friendly, and I for one was looking forward to riding Sheikra again.

But!  We do have other treats coming up this summer.  I just finished booking our flight to Baton Rouge for the Gumbo Dancesport Championship–we leave a month from today.  We’ve heard this is a great, well-run comp and we are excited to participate after missing it last year.  Also, with Tampa off the agenda, we have a little more money in the dance budget, just in time to sign up for a coaching session in early July with Andre & Natalie Paramonov.  I never thought that after only a few years dancing together & competing we’d be exposed to such high-level instruction.  It gives me that “Wow, we are really doing this!” feeling.

Bummers happen, but the great thing about ballroom dancing is that there’s always something else to look forward to: another comp, another lesson, or maybe just a new pair of shoes… *wiggles eyebrows*

[Will "Soviet Russia" in post title attract Russian spambots? We'll see.]

We returned Sunday night from the High Point Classic Dancesport Championships. There are no pictures from this competition, for good reason: we danced very badly! Out of 6 events entered we placed in only one. Sigh.

As Daniel and I discussed on the way home yesterday, everyone is bound to have a bad competition sometimes. We were due: all our experiences so far had been excellent. And, really, even though we didn’t place well, we had a good time and met some great new people. But our heads were not quite in the game. Up until Friday morning we were undecided about whether we’d even attend the competition and that affected our performance. Also, we’ve been dancing a lot of the same steps and routines for about a year and a half now and we think we need some new material. It’s too easy to zone out during a round if you are just auto-piloting through your steps.

So now we have some ideas about what to work on for the rest of this year and early next year. No more competitions in 2009; the calendar for 2010 is to be decided but likely to include the Triangle Open (Raleigh, NC in February) and possibly the Royal Palm Dancesport Extravaganza in Coconut Creek, FL in January. Who doesn’t love Florida in January?

We are back from the Hotlanta Dance Challenge/Rising Star Newcomers’ Ball after dancing 18 heats on Friday, 18 on Saturday, and 28 today–by far the most we have danced at any competition we’ve participated in.  I expected to have fun but it was even MORE fun than I imagined.  So much positive energy and excitement.  And it was great to see Carson, Elaine, John, Jorge, and Suzanne, who all came up from Macon at various times and stopped in to see us.  Props also to Bill & Grace for letting us stay at their condo.  All in all it was an amazing weekend.

We danced well (most of the time!) and placed pretty well–a lot of 1st places thanks to being uncontested in our category, but some “real” 1sts too.  The great thing about dancing so many events is that you have room to make some mistakes without feeling like you’ve blown all your chances.  Eddie said he just wanted us to get comfortable on the floor and by the end of today, we definitely were.  I knew we’d get better at managing our nerves and cooperating on the floor, and we did.  What I didn’t expect was to also learn how to keep our energy up when the dances just keep coming.  It’s one thing to go all-out in practice but having to be “on” and give a performance multiple times over a period of hours. . . well, we found reserves of charisma we didn’t know we had!

I will post results in a couple of days when I’ve had a chance to compare our heat list with the program.  We did not get any videos, unfortunately: personal video was not allowed and the “official” video service was just too expensive.  Elaine took some pictures for us that I need to look at and get posted, and DecaDance Photography was there taking professional pictures, so I should be able to link to their gallery.  Stay tuned!

The heat lists for the Hotlanta Dance Challenge came out last night.  We initially entered just a few amateur events, but Eddie wanted us to dance more.  Now we are doing 64 heats!  Most of them are single dances, so that’s not quite as crazy as it sounds, but it’s still a heck of a lot.  So if you want to see us dance this weekend, here are the specifics:

The competition is being held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel at Ravinia, 4355 Ashford Dunwoody, Atlanta 30346.

• Friday, we are dancing almost straight through from 9:50 a.m. to noon in the Rising Star ballroom.
• Saturday, we dance from 11:30 to noon and from 12:45 to 1:45 in the Rising Star ballroom.
• Sunday, we dance at 10:45, 11:00, and from 11:45 to 2:10 (with a few breaks), mostly in Ballroom A but a few heats in Ballroom B.

We are very excited to be participating in such a huge competition.  No matter the results, we are sure to have a great time!  We would love to have a cheering section, too.  Hopefully you can come and see us in action!  Here’s the link to buy spectator tickets.  Tickets are for admission to both the Rising Star ballroom and the Hotlanta ballroom where the top professional and pro-am couples will be dancing, so you can definitely see a lot of great dancing.  Several very enticing vendors will be on hand as well, so if you are a fan of shoes and gowns, bring your credit card (or leave it in the car…).

Hope to see you this weekend–remember to cheer for couple #300!

Last week I attended the ballroom dance competition at the Georgia Golden Olympics.  In the past, this competition has not been very well attended.  This year the area’s USA Dance chapters promoted the event for months in advance, and it paid off.  The two chapters (#6059 Greater Macon and #6100 Houston County) entered a total of 7 couples.  Isabel and Azmi Kabbani from Greater Macon Chapter #6059 swept the gold medals.  Congratulations, Dr. and Mrs. Kabbani!  All the competitors had a great time:

It was hard to sit on the sidelines of a competition without doing any dancing myself.  Luckily we will get our turn in just a few weeks at Hotlanta and High Point.

Click here to see videos of all of our dances at last weekend’s SouthernStar Midsummer Classic.  Thanks again to our awesome videographer Jeff for wielding the camera and enduring many hours on a metal folding chair!  Here’s one video from the playlist just to get you started.  This is silver-level swing; we got straight first places from the judges for this one!

Click through to YouTube to see the rest.

Every competition we participate in brings new pleasures.  At this year’s SouthernStar Midsummer Classic in Tampa, FL we got to see a couple we met last year as spectators, John and Theresa, “graduate” to the next level and become competitors.  They are such nice, fun people–last year, despite our being strangers to them, they agreed to take video for us with Daniel’s digital camera.  Now they are obviously on their way to becoming great dancers: they got two 1st places and two 2nd places out of the 8 events they entered!  Yaaay, John & Theresa!

With our former photographers now sharing the competition floor with us, we needed someone new on video duty.  Our extremely obliging friend Jeff, who teaches with me at Macon State, made the trip to Tampa with us and spent the whole day Saturday in the folding chairs of the spectator area, wielding the camera.  We are so glad to have videos of nearly all our heats.  Thanks, Jeff!

Considering how little we’ve been able to dance and practice since we went to Raleigh back in February, we went into this competition with minimal expectations.  We were rewarded with excellent results!  Our goals were to place better than we did last year and to make one callback in each of the Challenge events we entered.  We achieved all of those goals except for one Challenge where we didn’t get a callback.  So we are very happy with our results and with the positive comments we got from other dancers.  It’s pretty exciting when a Championship-level dancer looks you right in the eye and says “You guys are really good!”

Here are our results:

• SouthernStar Rhythm Challenge (Cha-cha/Rumba/Swing): did not advance from semifinal
• Bronze American Rhythm (C/R/S): 2nd place out of 8
• Bronze American Smooth (Waltz/Tango/Foxtrot): 2nd place out of 7
• SouthernStar Smooth Challenge (W/T/F): advanced from quarterfinal to semifinal
• Silver American Rhythm (C/R/S): FIRST place out of 4; this event was a $50 scholarship from the Dayton chapter of USA Dance.

Because of some scheduling conflicts we’ve decided against competing at the Derby City Dancesport Championship in August and are instead aiming for the High Point Classic Dancesport Championship in October in High Point, NC.  After this past weekend we are very excited to keep improving our dancing and to do even better at our next comp.

Our registration form for this year’s SouthernStar Midsummer Classic in Tampa went out in the mail today, so it’s official–we are going!  By the end of the month we also expect to register for the Derby City DanceSport Championship in Louisville, KY.  It’s going to be a busy few weeks but we’re looking forward to making up for the last couple of months during which we didn’t get to do much dancing. Daniel’s knee is all healed up and he is ready to get busy!

We are especially looking forward to Tampa because at least one of our friends will be making the trip with us to serve as photographer, videographer, and cheerleader.  Since we are the only dancers in our chapter who travel to competitions we are always on our own–that’s why we never come back with any pictures to share!  This time will be different, so stay tuned for pics at the end of this month.

On Sunday we head up to Atlanta for our first lesson with a new instructor.  I don’t want to identify him without his permission, so for now I’ll just say he comes highly recommended and has a long and distinguished dance career.  We are looking forward to getting to know him and working with him to improve our dancing.

We’ve been lying low for the past few weeks because Daniel has been having trouble with his right knee hurting and swelling, especially when he dances.  He saw his doctor last week and the doctor advised him not to dance till he’d seen an orthopedist.  Today we heard back from the doctor’s office and they had set him up an appointment with the orthopedist for Monday morning.  I’ve been down the “knee problem” road before and I’m hoping his diagnosis will be similar to mine, i.e., something that physical therapy can solve.

Meanwhile, we had to decide against competing in Baton Rouge at the end of this month, which is a big disappointment to both of us.  But unless the doctor tells us differently, we are still planning to compete in Tampa at the end of July and in Louisville, KY in mid-August.  Louisville will be our biggest competition so far, but Tampa will be our first repeat appearance at the same competition, which is pretty cool.  Last year’s trip to Tampa was my first experience of how welcoming and friendly amateur competitors are.  We’re looking forward to going there again.