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What we’re up to this week

(you can see I’m trying to make “What we’re up to this week” a Regular Feature of this here Internet Website.)

Our monthly dance is tomorrow! Don’t forget the time change: 8:30 to 11:00. Come and give us a good send-off to our competition next weekend. Sunday we have a lesson; one last chance to polish up with our instructor and then we’ll get some practice in next week.

For those of you who played along with “Pick My Dress” on Facebook, we are now in the “on tenterhooks awaiting its arrival” phase. Tune in after the competition for pics and video to see what the final choice was.

Finally, if you haven’t already seen this video, I recommend watching it immediately. It’s not recent, but BOY is it good.

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competitions dance events exhibitions & performances Friday Night Dance Parties Uncategorized USA Dance

What we’re up to this week

The schedule for next weekend’s Carolina Fall Classic was posted last night and I have printed out our heat lists. SO EXCITED. It’s the first time in a few years that we’ve been able to attend this competition. It has gone from fairly humble beginnings to a record number of entries this year largely through the good offices of the organizers, Wayne and Marie Crowder (who also founded the awesome Triangle Open where we got to dance several years ago–college students now run that comp themselves, which gladdens this dancing professor’s heart!). We are going to be dancing a lot next weekend, especially if we make it into some semi-finals and finals. Cross your fingers for us and watch @dldancers on Twitter for updates. Special thanks to USA Dance Greater Macon Chapter 6059 for their generous support of our entries and hotel for this competition.

We’ve also been practicing with the lovely Denise Froemke for the Kay Community Service Center’s “Dancing for the Stars” event in Fort Valley on November 15. Daniel will be Denise’s partner for this event and they are getting ready to dance a cha-cha that you will not want to miss! Lots of the performers are contemporary/urban style ballroom dancers–if you don’t know this style of dance, it is definitely worth checking out. You could be seeing the next evolution of ballroom!

Finally, we are hosting our 4th Friday dance tonight and expecting a great turnout. Daniel has been scoping out new music again. Have you ever danced a cha-cha to a song in Turkish? Tonight, you will get your chance. Join us at the Howard Community Club at 8 p.m. for just $5 per person.

See you on the dance floor!

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exhibitions & performances Friday Night Dance Parties teaching

What we’re up to this week

Counting the days till our performance at the Tubman Museum’s International Taste of Soul on August 30! We have our dances and our music picked out, and my new Latin costume has come from Latino Dancewears. I promise they are not compensating me to say this (yet!) but I have been impressed with the quick and responsive service that this company provides. They do custom made-to-measure dresses with high quality stones but they also have more economical options including a great sale section.

This week ends our Tuesday night waltz class at Madison Studio. Starting September 8 we’ll be teaching bronze level cha-cha on Tuesday nights; we are also featuring silver level cha-cha and tango workshops on Sunday, September 20. You can email if you’d like more information or to sign up for any of our classes and workshops.

And, of course, Friday is our monthly dance at Howard Community Club! 8:00-10:30 p.m., $5 admission, casual dress, bring your song requests. Daniel has been picking out new songs from Postmodern Jukebox and I’m trying to do my part finding cool things on the radio like this or this.

Finally, I’d like to give a shout-out to my dear colleague Sydney Chalfa, whose son Matthew is getting married next weekend. Sydney and Matthew took a lesson from us last week and they are dancing the rumba for their mother-son dance! Congratulations to the happy couple and a very proud mother of the groom!

 

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Friday Night Dance Parties social dancing USA Dance

USA Dance last weekend, our dance this weekend!

In case you missed it (did you know that’s become an abbreviation? ICYMI.), here’s a great video clip of Minwoo & Anna dancing the cha-cha step that Jim Riley taught us at USA Dance #6059’s monthly chapter dance this past Saturday. Gotta admit, that step was challenging. But it’s very cool once you put it all together. We had a great time that night.

Keeping the fun going, we are hosting our dance this coming weekend, Friday, Jan. 17. It’ll be at the Howard Community Club from 8-10:30 p.m. Casual dress, $5 admission, bring your song requests. We will be continuing our friendly dance competition, so if you would like to take home a Sparkly Trophy for the month, this could be your chance!  Hope to see you then!

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Friday Night Dance Parties lessons social dancing teaching

2014 Scheduling Update

For those who are still drafting their New Year’s resolutions, we are delaying our waltz lessons until February. The dates will be Feb. 16 and Feb. 23–two Sundays–4:00 to 5:30. Total cost for this “mini session” of classes is $45 per person.  Meanwhile, we will be hosting our monthly dance at the Howard Community Club on Friday, January 17 and then Friday, February 28 as scheduled.

I’ve got some more interesting dance news for this year but I’m waiting to make sure everything is finalized before I make it public. (teaser teaser teaser!)

By the way, do you like this new layout?

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exhibitions & performances Friday Night Dance Parties social dancing teaching

What’s up in 2014?

Well, DLDancers fans, we are hoping to make 2014 a BIG year that will see us back into competition after a hiatus that has gone on for too long!  Along the way, we will be

  • teaching the waltz January 5 and January 19 4:00-5:30 at Madison Studio, 1575 Forest Hill Road in Macon. The cost is $45 per person. Beginners are welcome and partners are not required.
  • continuing to teach the rumba each month at Shadows Dinner Theatre in downtown Macon starting in February. We are anticipating further collaborations with Shadows in 2014 as well and will keep you posted.
  • performing in an exhibition on February 13 at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame, presented by Paula East.
  • continuing to host our monthly dances at Howard Community Club. Here are the dates; mark your calendars!
Jan. 17
Feb. 28
March 7
April 25
May 23
June 27
July 25
Aug. 22
Sept. 26
Oct. 24
Nov. 28
Dec. 19

These dates are all Fridays but not all fourth Fridays. The time (8:00-10:30) and admission price ($5) will stay the same. We plan to keep up our friendly dance competition as well, so if you’ve ever wanted to take home a sparkly trophy, 2014 could be your year.

See you on the dancefloor!

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Friday Night Dance Parties

Post-Christmas/Pre-2014 Dance December 27

Just a quick note that we will host our monthly dance on Dec. 27 as usual. Time to burn off a few holiday calories and/or get an early start on your 2014 resolution to DANCE MORE.  8:00-10:30 p.m. at Howard Community Club, $5 admission, casual dress. Plus you can dance in our friendly competition and take home the sparkly trophy!  Hope to see you there.

Stay tuned for info about our plans for the new year!

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Dancing Stars of Central Georgia Friday Night Dance Parties

Win tickets to Dancing Stars of Central Georgia!

Great news, everybody: at our dance this coming Friday we’ll be raffling off a pair of tickets to Dancing Stars of Central Georgia.  Buy a raffle ticket for $1 and be entered to win!  The face value of these tickets is $75 each; your ticket admits you to the cocktail hour (open bar), dinner, the dance competition, and open dancing afterward.

We will donate all the raffle proceeds to the Alzheimer’s Association and each ticket you buy is an additional chance to be the winner!  Details for our dance and the Dancing Stars event are below:

  • Daniel’s Friday Night Dance Party
  • 8:00-10:30 p.m.
  • Howard Community Club, 5645 Forsyth Rd.
  • $5 admission, soft drinks & water available
  • Casual dress
  • Raffle tickets $1 each

 

  • Dancing Stars of Central Georgia
  • Saturday, May 12
  • Macon City Auditorium
  • Cocktail hour (open bar) at 6:00, doors open for dinner at 7:00, dance competition starts at 8:00
  • Cocktail attire

If you don’t win the drawing you can still buy tickets and make donations via www.dancingstarsofcentralgeorgia.com, but don’t wait.  The event organizers are predicting a sell-out by the end of next week!

See you soon on the dance floor!

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Kirstie falls, Daniel snorts, I elbow Daniel in the face

First of all, let me say thank you once again to everybody who came out to our monthly-dance-turned-Daniel’s-birthday-party last night.  It was a ton of fun, Daniel was delighted, and we will be eating the leftover snacks for days!  Extra shout-outs to one couple (you know who you are) for bravely attending your first social dance EVER.  It only gets easier from here!

Now, then (weird transition phrase, that).  After finally watching Monday’s Dancing with the Stars sometime around Wednesday night–DVR is a necessity for the overscheduled–and seeing Kirstie Alley’s much-discussed fall, I realized I didn’t want to be the only dance blogger not to, well, discuss it.  So: my thoughts, let me show you them.

I thought Maks was incredibly professional in the way he handled the whole thing.  He immediately cued Kirstie back into the routine by listening to the music and taking a position that told her where they would pick up in the choreography.  Then, once it was over, he took full responsibility for the fall–although Kirstie chimed in on Twitter and said “Maks is too humble; we all know it takes two to tango.”  But as Daniel always reminds beginner gentlemen, the man is in charge on the dance floor but that means he has to take the blame if something goes wrong.

As for Kirstie, I’ve been impressed by her performances anyway, but the way she rose to the occasion of dancing the rest of her routine really knocked my socks off.  That’s where her professionalism–born, I assume, of a long show-business career–stood her in good stead.  Adrenaline can sometimes be your friend too: the worst has already happened, your body is buzzing from dealing with the sudden and unexpected, and stopping is not really an option, so why bother being cautious or anxious through the rest of the routine?

I worry that some people will look at the fall, think “Oh, that happened because Kirstie is too fat” and conclude that people who are not already at a healthy weight shouldn’t be dancing.  Granted, Kirstie is not a 90-pound sylph, but few people are.  Kirstie’s weight cannot have been an issue in that move, which (as she and Maks pointed out later in the “celebriquarium”) they had rehearsed a million times.  Maks wouldn’t have put it in the choreography if he didn’t think they could both accomplish it.  Ballroom dancing is impressively adaptable to people of all shapes and sizes; you don’t have to already be skinny and fit to start dancing or even to dance at quite a high level.  It is also–as DWTS has shown repeatedly–an excellent way to get in shape and lose weight if that’s your goal.

People forget, when they see dance performances in their final state, that hours of blood, toil, tears, and sweat go into perfecting those performances.  To me, Kirstie’s fall was merely an instance in which that hard work momentarily became visible in the final product.  No one wants that to happen, but in a way I think it’s beneficial when it does.  Dancing seems to intimidate a lot of people because they think of it as a product of talent rather than effort.  I’ll give you a hint: it’s mostly effort.  Which is why, in the course of learning the rumba routine we danced for everybody last night, I elbowed Daniel in the forehead hard enough to make a sound (“thwock!”) and Daniel once snorted (by accident) right behind my head and made me burst out laughing.  Fortunately, those things happened in lessons and not in a performance.  Kirstie and Maks did exactly the right thing when they just got up and kept going as if nothing had happened.  That’s the part we could learn from.  Daniel and I are both guilty of letting minor mishaps show on our faces when they would probably have gone unnoticed otherwise.  It’s something we should work on so that if we ever have a major mishap on the floor, we have the wherewithal to follow Kirstie & Maks’s example and just keep going.

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Friday Night Dance Parties social dancing

New Year, New Dance Dates

Happy 2011, everybody!  After a slow-and-steady year of monthly Sunday night dances we’ve had the opportunity to move our monthly dances to the second Friday of each month.  Dances will start at 7:30 p.m. and end at 10 p.m. Everything else stays the same: Howard Community Club, $5 admission, casual dress.  Dates are as follows:

  • January 14
  • February 25 (not the second Friday, obviously–something was already booked)
  • March 11
  • April 8
  • May 13
  • June 10
  • July 8
  • August 12
  • September 9
  • October 14
  • November 11
  • December 16

We hope to see you for another year of great dancing!