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Our dancers have been helping us come up with a list of rules for ballroom dancing.  Herewith, the rules so far:

1. No tickling, no groping: Keep your hands where they’re supposed to be.  Gentlemen, I’m lookin’ at you.
2. Stand like a king: Daniel came up with this great phrase to characterize the ideal male dance posture that is both regal and relaxed.
3. Respect the bubble: Baby & Johnny had this one figured out a quarter-century ago: “This is my dance space; this is your dance space.  I don’t come into yours; you don’t come into mine.”
4. Don’t snatch: In the South you can use the verb “snatch” to characterize any action of grabbing something suddenly.  Snatching your dance partner is not cool.  Some moves appear to require snatching, but this is an illusion.
5. You can’t go till he goes: Ladies, this one’s for you.  Your partner gets to decide when you start dancing.  Wait for it. . . wait for it. . .
6. Don’t “Hulk out”: Concentration does some odd things to one’s facial expressions, neck veins, hand grip, etc.  Keep it loose and light.  (If you start to turn green, you’re doing it wrong.)
7. No apologetic birds, no sad princesses: Dance big and smile!  Everything you do will look better.

I think I am leaving some out.   Guys & gals, leave me a comment if you remember one that I forgot.

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Yesterday was our last lesson with Eddie before we go to Gumbo the weekend after next.  We spent our entire lesson (90 minutes) doing “rounds,” which means running through our competition routines over and over again with only a small break between repetitions.  Waltz waltz waltz.  Tango tango.  Waltz-tango. Foxtrot foxtrot foxtrot foxtrot. Waltz-tango-foxtrot. Waltz-tango-foxtrot. Waltz-tango-foxtrot.  You get the idea.

Rounds are ideal for building stamina, obviously: when I took my shoes off at the end of the lesson, they had sweat stains around the top of the heels.  But they also help you learn to change gears really quickly.  In a typical multi-dance heat in a competition, you walk onto the floor and dance anywhere from 2 to 5 dances (depending on your level) consecutively without leaving the floor.  When you have finished one dance, you get a few seconds to take your starting position for the next one, and off you go.  You are judged not only on technique but on “the character of the dance,” so during that short break you have to let go of the dance you just completed and focus on the one that’s coming next.  After making your waltz look like a waltz–smooth, graceful, romantic–you must immediately make your tango look like a tango (sharp and aggressive) and then your foxtrot look like a foxtrot (upbeat, happy, elegant).  And do all this while controlling your nerves, staying in time with the music, and practicing correct floorcraft and technique.  No pressure!

I always have a hard time with waltz, especially in the very first heat of the day.  Being slow, smooth, and controlled is a challenge when you are buzzing with adrenaline.  But yesterday we worked on being more aggressive and powerful in waltz while still expressing the character of the dance: lowering, hinging steps from the hip, covering more floor.  I found that if I really focus on my body, it gives my nervous brain something to do AND my dancing gets better.  Sometimes I look at myself on video and I can see that I’m dancing with some weird combination of laziness and tentativeness.  In some ways I’m holding back (not stretching my steps or working my hips) while in other ways I’m slacking off (letting my bum stick out or not staying left).  Yesterday, after an hour or so of drilling our smooth routines and really trying to overcome those shortcomings, I suddenly found that my dancing in cha-cha, rumba, and swing got better too.  A rising tide lifts all boats, it seems.

We are going to do some more rounds on our own tomorrow and one or two days next week, then we leave for Gumbo next Thursday.  Stay tuned!

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A body that is dancing tends to continue dancing unless acted on by an outside force.  In the absence of outside forces (spring semester ended on May 6;  congratulations, Class of 2011!), we have been dancing a lot and doing a lot of dance-related stuff in the last several days.  Since I haven’t had to teach I’ve been going to four ballet classes a week at Madison Studio: my usual twice-a-week “Pearls” class (average age: 11, focused on beginning pointe work and trying to remember which is croisé and which is effacé) plus two adult classes which, despite being ostensibly for beginners, serve to demonstrate that one can never spend too much time working on the basics.  All this ballet is having several salubrious effects, including finally loosening up the hamstring I pulled a few months ago and keeping me from going insane as I work on revisions to my book manuscript.

We are still working on our paso doble; on Monday we went over the videos we recorded in our last lesson with Eddie and just repeated, repeated, repeated the steps without even trying to get up to tempo.  This video that a friend sent me earlier today demonstrates just how far up “up to tempo” actually is.

No lesson this past weekend, but on Sunday we had an all-studio blocking rehearsal at Madison Studio for the recital on June 4.  Having the entire population of the studio in one place at one time was an impressive exercise!  It was our dancers’ first time doing their recital piece for any kind of audience and they did great.  We also managed to remember our rumba routine despite not having done it for a while.  The real high point was running the “production finale” in which every class appears, one after the other, and dances a short additional routine.  Lots of us are in more than one class, so there was a lot of dashing from one side of the studio to the other, hurried changing of shoes, and general crowd control.  The ballroom dancers also had a good laugh at the “FootUndeez” I wear for the contemporary ballet number I’m dancing in.  Yes, they look like panties for your feet.  Hence the name.  Can we all just move on now?  (Okay, they are pretty funny, especially the ones I’ve seen that have a little pink net tutu ruffle around the elastic part.)

After regular classes on Monday (Pearls class, paso practice with Daniel, ballroom class) and adult class Tuesday at noon, the ballroom group reconvened at the studio on Tuesday evening to get pictures taken.  The marvelous Keiko Guest (check out the “Fine Art” side of her site for sure, but a couple of those may not be SFW) comes to the studio once a year to take individual pictures of everyone in their recital costumes.  She brings along a staff of 3 or 4 people, a small photography-studio setup (lights, background, even one of those fans to make your hair blow around and look glamorous), and more computer equipment than I ever thought possible.  In less than an hour we had lined up to wait, had a jolly time getting our photos taken, and looked at our proofs to order prints.  The pictures were amazingly good and I can’t wait to get the prints.  Ms. Guest is a former dancer herself, so she understands what good lines look like and how to adjust people’s positions so that on film, we look like better dancers than we probably really are!  Daniel and I had a lot of fun coming up with poses for ourselves and then inflicting them on our other two couples.  The best part was taking some shots of all 6 of us together.  She somehow made us all look attractive and dancerly while crammed into about 4 square feet of space on her backdrop.

So it’s been a great couple of weeks, and the beat goes on.  This evening we’re dancing at Pinegate with the performance ensemble from Madison, then on Saturday we have a lesson from Eddie.  And today we got a call from another retirement community here in town, wanting us to schedule a performance.  AND…according to the counter on their website, Gumbo is just 5 days away.  I’m pleased to report that the counter is not accurate!

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Yesterday we started learning a Paso Doble routine in our lesson with Eddie.  Daniel is especially excited about the paso because it requires good posture and sharp movements: he feels like it will help him improve his technique in our other dances.  Plus, he loves exhibition-style routines with lots of eye-catching, dramatic moves. We entered Open Paso Doble for the competition in Baton Rouge, hoping we would have the routine ready to go by mid-June.  That may or may not happen!  We learned enough steps on Saturday that we can get through a 90-second heat, but it’s a pretty challenging dance.  The steps are not too complex and the routine is not complicated.  The hard part is the musical phrasing.  In other competition dances, as long as you start on the “one” (i.e., 5-6-7-8-ONE), you’re generally okay.  It’s perfectly acceptable to wait a couple of bars and make sure you catch the beat before starting off.  Paso doble music, on the other hand, is very structured.  Yesterday, Daniel asked Eddie where in the music we have to start.  We were a little intimidated when we found out that we have to start on 3.  As in, the third beat after the song starts.  Silence–one–two–GO.  If we start wrong, or if we don’t get the timing right during the routine, then we’re irrevocably in the weeds.  So that’s pretty scary.  On the other hand, I get to do a tour jete, which is awesome.

Here’s some competition paso from a few years ago, using the music that is almost always used for paso doble:

And here’s an exhibition paso:

It is cool to watch these top-level dancers and see them doing the same steps we are learning (albeit doing them a lot better!).  We are in a little over our heads, but we are challenging ourselves and we’re motivated to improve, so it will come.  Will it come by June 17?  Not sure.  I am still hopeful.

And remember: the man is the matador.  The woman is the cape.  And there is no bull.

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Our own Eddie Ares had a bee in his bonnet about the movie Black Swan on Saturday.  He saw it as a metaphor for different types of people and how easy or difficult it is for a particular type to inhabit the character of a particular dance.  As he explained it, a black swan is a fearless and aggressive performer who will perform any kind of character with no hesitation.  A white swan might be very proficient at technique but is always holding back or maintaining boundaries.  As a result, something might be missing from the character of a dance. The audience might be able to perceive a whiff of self-restraint on the part of the dancer that reads as anxiety.  I remembered an offhand comment from one of Eddie’s dancers when I’d told her about a tough heat that we’d danced in competition.  I’d said that we struggled because Daniel forgot the steps but she said I was the one who looked worried.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true, because I’m a white swan all the way.  Daniel is a total black swan: no boundaries, never gets embarrassed, puts it all out there dialed up to 11.

In Eddie’s philosophy (and I think this is true), black swans can easily pretend to be white swans but white swans have a hard time going over to the dark side. Some dances are easy for white swans like me to characterize because they come from a “happy” or “graceful” or “pretty” place: waltz, foxtrot, swing.  Tango and rumba are hard for white swans because they are more “dark” or “sexy.”  The only one I’m not sure about is cha-cha.  Maybe that’s part of the reason I never feel really proficient at cha-cha: I don’t entirely understand the character of that dance.  People define the cha-cha as “flirty” but I have little notion of how to express that quality.  I also haven’t sussed out why white swans can’t fake the black-swan qualities with 100% success.  It could be different for every swan.  The good news is that in ballroom, you always have two swans together who can balance each other’s shortcomings.  The raw energy of the black swan probably needs some reining in from the boundary-loving white.

…Right?

Confession: I have not yet seen Black Swan despite its being a ballet movie.  Normally I never miss a dance movie and especially not a ballet movie, but I have resisted Black Swan because I am hypersensitive to the type of visually freaky psychological horror that the movie involves.  That is, I have not seen Black Swan because I’m too much of a white swan.  I will probably cowboy-up and see it soon.  But maybe I’ll wait till it comes on pay-per-view and watch it in the daytime with the lights on.

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From Wikipedia: “The Peter Principle is a special case of a ubiquitous observation: anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails.”

See also: my ability to dance the rumba.  I fear that up until recently I may have been coasting on my previous dance experience plus Daniel’s savant-like ability to remember choreography.  But today we started a new rumba routine, having been competing with the same one for probably a couple of years.  The new routine is gorgeous but it’s a huge jump up in difficulty.  In particular, it contains a lot of turns.  Turns are my nemesis but Eddie is big on rotation as a way of creating impact on the floor, so I will have to get on board.  The new routine contains: one underarm turn, one spiral, one 3-step turn, one telemark, and two or three chainés–and we’re not even finished with it.  Until today, I did not know what a telemark was nor that they were used in the rumba. Eddie also put in an alemana originally, and then took it out for now because I could not get my head around it.  It’s definitely a more challenging application.

I would by no means say that I have failed but since I’m accustomed to things coming somewhat easy, I did get a little impatient.  I know it’ll come; I just wish it would come a little FASTER.  Eddie & Daniel insist on laughing at me when I get impatient, which is (believe it or not) helpful.  Daniel is a big believer in learning the steps and then polishing the technique (sensible!), whereas I want to learn everything at once and do it well right away.  Cases in point:

• I am dancing with Eddie and he has just corrected my open breaks, which apparently I’ve been doing rather badly for quite some time.  And I am concentrating like anything on doing them really, really well when my attention wanders for .001 second.  I snap back and immediately say “That was terrible,” and Eddie just loses it laughing.  Then I have to laugh because maybe I could stop self-criticizing and just…dance the steps???
• Having mostly recovered from that one, dancing with Daniel, I 3-step-turn into the telemark and manage to nail Daniel squarely in the forehead with my elbow.  It made a noise!  *klok*  I felt terrible, but he wasn’t hurt, and it was funny.

So today’s lesson was ostensibly about the rumba but really about not taking myself too seriously.  And maybe about wearing safety equipment when learning new choreography.

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We started learning a mambo routine in our lesson with Eddie today.  The mambo is going to be our nemesis, at least for a while.  I understood “on2″ when Johnny Castle explained it.  For that matter, I understand it when Eddie explains it.  Then the music comes on, the tempo is INSANE, and we are both struggling to keep up.  But it’ll come.  Rome not built in a day, etc.  Eddie, you see, used to be world professional mambo champion.  Asking him to teach the mambo is like asking Daniel to root for the Canadiens.

I had to tell Eddie that he is not allowed to put that “conga drum motion on my butt” thing in our routine.  Not that Daniel wouldn’t like it (heehee) but it’s…a little objectifying, don’t you think?  I explained to the gentlemen that “this is what you get when a feminist does the mambo.”  Already I have to learn to shimmy convincingly and with a straight face.  My objection to the shimmy is not so much ideological as psychological.  I don’t think of myself as the shimmy type.  I will after this, I suppose.  Meanwhile, Daniel has concluded that a half-hour of mambo a day will take care of any worries he has about excess weight.  Who knew dancing was such a source of self-improvement?

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Coming soon to a dance venue near you:

• USA Dance Greater Macon Chapter #6059 monthly dance, November 13. 7:30-10:30 p.m. including a complimentary dance lesson from 7:30 to 8:00 followed by general dancing.  Dressy casual; light refreshments; $7 for members/$10 non-members.
• Our Sunday Night Dance Party is moving to the 3rd Sunday–November 21–for this month.  This will be the last SNDP of 2010!  7 p.m.; $5 admission; casual dress; bring CDs and song requests.  Stay tuned for dance dates in 2011 coming soon!
• By popular demand (no, really!), we are doing one more session of group classes at Madison Studio this year: Monday evenings at 7 p.m., November 15 through December 20.  Each class is one hour; the total cost for the 6-week session is $78 per person which breaks down to $13 per class.  Private lessons are also available.  Contact us or Madison Studio for more information.

See you on the dancefloor!

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Daniel and I thank–belatedly but no less enthusiastically–Eddie Ares and Chasity Smith from Academy Ballroom Atlanta for coming to Macon this past Sunday to teach a workshop for us at the Howard Community Club.  Last year at Stars Over Macon, Eddie offered to come and give us a workshop.  The scheduling turned out to be the biggest challenge, but once we fixed on a date, it all ran like clockwork.  Even the rain that fell steadily throughout Sunday afternoon and evening didn’t keep people away.  Between 25 and 30 people attended and learned from Eddie about creating impact and visual interest in their dancing by making fairly simple changes: rotating when doing box steps in rumba, for instance, or alternating box steps with cross-body leads.  As Eddie pointed out, even social dancers want to look great on the floor and attract people’s attention.  The easiest way to do that is by staying in motion and showing spectators every angle of the body.  He taught everyone a simple but impressive-looking routine with some elements of styling for extra polish and visual appeal.  It was a great learning experience and a wonderful exposure to high-level instruction for those of us who would usually have to travel at least an hour up the highway to get it!

Best of all, Eddie suggested that he might be able to organize more workshops here in Macon with other instructors from Academy.  These are still in the early planning stages, but we’ll keep you posted as more information becomes available.

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After a few weeks of not much dancing, we turn over a new leaf tomorrow and head into a week–actually, more like a month–of TONS of dancing.  Hooray!  Here we go:

Tomorrow: private lesson with Eddie and then workshop with Eddie right here in Macon at the Howard Community Club, with our 4th Sunday dance to follow at 7 p.m. as usual.  We have had 30 RSVPs so far and could probably squeeze in a few more.  Email me (laura at dldancers dot com), comment on the “Workshop with Eddie” post here on DLDancers.com, or RSVP to “Dance Workshop with Eddie Ares” on Facebook.

Monday & Wednesday: Jane Madison of Madison Studio is out of town visiting her daughter (the lovely & talented Faith Madison, recently promoted to the corps de ballet of Colorado Ballet) and has asked Daniel and me to substitute-teach the ballet class that I usually take.  We’re going to start them off with the waltz on Monday.  Who knows what could happen on Wednesday?  Also on Monday, we are teaching our first private lesson to an engaged couple getting married in December.  Soooooper excited about that.

Next Saturday (Oct. 2) we have another lesson with Eddie up at Academy Ballroom.  They had to re-do the floor again (2nd time in less than a year, I think) at Academy after an unfortunate plumbing incident but it has all worked out for the best considering that they were able to add another 400 square feet to the studio when they did it.

October 4 begins our next series of ballroom classes.  Click here and scroll down for details.

October 7-9 we’ll be in Missouri visiting my family.  If we get a long enough break from eating (huge family dinner Friday; huge family dinner Saturday; buy new pants Sunday before leaving for airport), we are thinking about trying to catch a dance here.  One of my favorite things about ballroom dancing is that you can almost always find a place to do it!

October 14-16 is the Hotlanta Dance Challenge.  We are not dancing (er, that I know of) but might try to get up there to watch.

October 22-24 is the weekend we’d really like to clone ourselves.  We had to choose between the Atlanta Dance Classic, Stars over Macon, and the Carolina Fall Classic.  We’re going to North Carolina, but it was a tough call.  Those of you that are local, please consider attending Stars over Macon if you’re not already going.  I hear that nearly all the tables are already sold but individual tickets should still be available.  It’s a fantastic event for a great cause.  We just couldn’t pass up what looks to be one of the biggest amateur comps we’ve been to.    The question is: can we learn enough Viennese waltz and Bolero steps tomorrow in our lesson with Eddie to get through a 1:30 competition round, thereby enabling us to enter Gold level events?  Stay tuned!

While you’re busy staying tuned, please go back to this post and vote on the dress choices!