Driving back from our lesson with Eddie this afternoon, I passed a minivan whose back window was dominated by a huge decal from a dance studio. Below the studio name was the slogan “Go big or don’t go!” I had to smile because I’d been having the same conversation with Eddie just a couple of hours earlier.

After struggling a lot at our last competition, and then taking a few weeks off with no lessons, I was feeling discouraged and unmotivated. Neither Daniel nor I was sure where we’d start or what we’d be working on in our lesson today. We started by explaining to Eddie as best we could what had happened at the competition: we had trouble with floorcraft when the dancefloor was crowded, and we both tended to forget our steps when we got nervous.

We worked on some strategies for what to do if we get boxed in:

• hold a pose if we happen to be in one.
• stop, close our feet, and restart the step we were in the middle of.
• do basics to get around the traffic jam.

But we also worked on posture and movement to make our dancing appear more aggressive.  Eddie didn’t quite come out and say this, although he agreed with me when I said it: part of floorcraft is psychological.  If we look like we’re big, aggressive, and moving confidently across the floor, other dancers will yield to us more often than if we look tentative and small.  It reminded me of marching band when I was in high school: the very first step and the very first note of the show have to be assertive, our director would tell us.  If you’re going to make a mistake, make a BIG mistake.  Go big or don’t go.

Sharing the floor with us this afternoon was a family–Mom, Dad, Daughter, Son-In-Law-To-Be, and Daughter’s Fabulous All-Rhinestone Wedding Shoes–getting lessons for the bride & groom’s first dance and the father-daughter dance at their wedding reception.  Watching SILTB dance with Daughter, I remembered how important posture and movement are, even for beginning dancers.  If you are a beginner, you are concentrating on remembering the steps.  You’re looking at your feet, your elbows have collapsed, your shoulders are rounded, and you’re taking little, tentative steps for fear of messing up.  Even if you get all the steps right, you don’t look as polished and accomplished as you could.  And let’s face it: if you’re paying for professional instruction for your wedding dance, you want to look polished and accomplished because you know 120 guests will be watching you!

Same goes for just about any social dance situation.  Those same basic steps plus upright posture, a solid dance frame, and a big smile will set you well apart from everyone else on the floor doing the clutch-and-sway.  It’s the ultimate in “fake it till you make it.”

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*

From our overnight trip to Atlanta on Wednesday/Thursday…

• Miles driven in teeming rain: approximately 90 (to ATL on Wednesday)
• Miles driven sans teeming rain, thank God: another 90 (back home on Thursday)
• Lessons with Eddie: 4 (2 per day)
• Routines learned: 2 (tango, foxtrot)
• Total wine expenditure: $20 (for only 2 glasses–”thanks,” California Pizza Kitchen)
• Mistakes in our breakfast order at Waffle House: 3
• Future lessons scheduled: 6 (w00t w00t!)

Despite being mistreated at every restaurant we stepped into (except you, Zesto. We still love you), it was a great trip.  Eddie even managed to get me excited about the foxtrot by putting together a fun, jazzy routine.  And he let me step on his foot every time I did that one move in the tango, and never complained.

I asked him to clarify–again–whether the steps he’s putting into these routines would be okay to do at Silver level, and he explained the things we’d have to change to make them “legal”: taking out a couple of “exhibition” moves (a backbend, a tour jeté, and something that he called a half-drop, I think) and making all the free spins into underarm turns.  Seems easy enough.  We just need to practice, practice, practice to get these routines down.  By the end of our last lesson yesterday, I could hardly remember anything.  Fortunately we have it all on video.

We saw Eddie again last weekend and spent most of our lesson learning a tango routine. Now we have 2 routines to practice while he is traveling for the next few weeks–we won’t get another lesson till early March. So far I have elbowed Daniel in the face twice (once each in waltz and tango) and gotten a hockey-style two-minute holding penalty for leaning on him too much in one section of the tango. I would characterize our routines at this juncture as “not ready for prime time” but we are having a lot of laughs learning them.

In other news, I am branching out my dance experience by going back to ballet classes after several years away. After a couple of weeks of “Teen/Adult Ballet” at the Madison Studio, I was asked to take a small role in the studio’s upcoming production, “Swan Lake Selections.” I am the Queen, which is a pantomime role rather than a dance role–in some of the traditional story ballets there are pantomime parts that serve to advance the plot, using pantomime as a kind of sign language. I went to my first rehearsal today to learn my part in Scene 1. I get to “greet” everyone at my son’s birthday party by walking around in a big circle while they bow to me, then have a conversation in pantomime with my son. My son is turning 21, which means that if you go by my real age, I had him at age 16. The Queen is a teenage mother! You can see the Queen in this video of an American Ballet Theatre production of Swan Lake:

Much like our waltz & tango performances, my Queen performance is not too polished yet. But at least I did not elbow anyone in the face.

Yesterday we had our first private lesson in months–Daniel’s surgery and then the holidays shot the wheels off November and December but we are getting the ball rolling now. We talked to Eddie about moving up from Bronze to Silver level at competition and discussed the possibility of skipping the syllabus levels altogether and starting to compete at Novice, which is the first open level. Neither of us felt quite ready to make that jump but Eddie wanted to start teaching us open choreography anyway. He says it will make us “more rounded dancers.” So we learned a new waltz routine that is so much fun! It is much more complex and strenuous than what we’re used to, but we can already see that once we learn it and polish our technique, it will look fantastic.

Daniel bought a video camera last week so we took it to our lesson. Eddie danced through the routine with me and by himself so that we could review the steps if we needed to when practicing. And boy, did we need to! We practiced a little this afternoon and had to look at the video several times to remember the steps correctly. I am hoping we’ll know them by our next lesson next Saturday.

We are excited. I am not yet sure what level we’ll end up in this year but since we know we want to move up, we are not planning to compete for a while anyway. We want to make sure we go to Gumbo this year and that might be our first competition of the year. If this waltz routine is any indication, we will need every minute of practice between now and then to be ready!

If you are looking to move beyond the basic waltz, tango, & foxtrot (or cha-cha, rumba, and swing), check out this workshop coming up:

This is a workshop for those wanting to learn the basics of West Coast Swing and Hustle. Step patterns will be given.

Instructor: Philip Jones. Philip started dancing in high school as a favor to his sister. She needed a dance partner. He says he didn’t want to but when he danced the waltz he was hooked. Since then he has studied under professionals such as Ashly DelGrosso (Dancing With the Stars) and Min Suyoung and currently studies with Olga Kormanovskaya in Atlanta. He has competed in American Smooth, Rhythm, Standard, and currently competes in International Open Latin.

Assisted by JoyDawn Perry

When: January 16, 2010

Where: Macon Health Club

Time: West Coast Swing 1-2:30pm and Hustle 2:45-4pm (15 minute practice following last session)

Cost: $15 per person each class or $25 per person for both classes

To sign up please contact: Paula East at paulaeastdance@yahoo.com or 478-750-0802.  Registration begins now and will end on January 10, 2010.

Clint Rauscher of Tango Evolution, assisted by our own Joyce Newman, will be teaching two Argentine Tango workshops in Macon on September 20 and October 18, with plans for a regular third Sunday workshop if turnout is good for those two dates. Each workshop will be 2 hours followed by a one-hour “practica” (practice time). Click here for details and online registration.

On Sunday, September 27 in conjunction with our Sunday Night Dance Party, Jim Riley, assisted by JoyDawn Perry, will teach a 90-minute workshop on technique and styling in Waltz. Last week, Jim, JoyDawn, and I got together and he demonstrated for me some of the material he plans to teach. Having seen what Jim has planned, I can safely say that this workshop will be great for those who already know some waltz steps but want to add more movement, flow, and grace to their dancing. Jim will also teach a short routine you can use for practice or social dancing. Click over to our Fall Dance Workshop page for information.

Photos from the SouthernStar Midsummer Classic competition are now available here.  We are in the American Smooth and American Rhythm divisions.

Also, last night a reporter/cameraman from WMAZ showed up at our First Friday dance at the Sports Hall of Fame.  He took video of us dancing and recorded short interviews with Paula and with me.  I don’t think the video made it on the air but they did put a story on their Web site (those are my feet in the photo slideshow!).  If I can find the video somewhere I’ll post it.

I was not expecting to be interviewed or to stand up in front of the First Friday crowd and tell them about our competition results, as Paula asked me to do.  Thank goodness I had changed clothes and put extra make-up on!  We had come to the dance straight from a lesson in Atlanta with Eddie Ares.  Eddie is a fantastic instructor but he works your tail off.  We worked on waltz and foxtrot and now we have “homework” to practice before our next lesson on Sunday the 16th.  It takes a good teacher to say “You must re-learn the basics” without demoralizing the students.  But in the end, the only demoralizing aspect was Friday afternoon traffic leaving Atlanta.

Just realized that I have spent the weekend with two of my favorite sadists: Eddie Ares and Jillian Michaels.

Yesterday, Daniel and I attended Eddie’s “Creating Impact” workshop at Academy Ballroom. It was a fast & furious 90 minutes of rumba and cha-cha exercises focused on making our dancing stronger, sharper, and faster. Very little partnering, very few breaks: just dance, dance, dance. At the end when we were chatting with Eddie, I said “Thanks for the butt-kicking!” He chuckled but then said “Well, conditioning is really important.”  Best of all, all the exercises are compact enough patterns that we can practice them at home–provided I can remember them!

He is right about the conditioning, of course. My cardio endurance is better than it used to be, but it could be better still, and my muscles could be stronger too.  So today I did Jillian’s “No More Trouble Zones” workout.  She describes it as a circuit training workout: it is all toning exercises, no cardio, but fast-paced enough that it gets your heart rate going too.  Do a few of her “Surrenders”* and see if your heart doesn’t beat faster.

Eddie’s class was fun.  Jillian’s workout…not so much.  But because her workouts are so challenging, I always feel like I’ve accomplished something after I finish one.  And that’s fun, at least.

*If you don’t know, don’t ask. Trust me.

We had our first lesson today with Wayne Brockman at Academy Ballroom Cumberland.  Wayne is a certified adjudicator with 3 decades of competitive experience.  A year ago, he left his successful studio in Colorado in his daughter’s hands and came to Georgia to teach with his sister.  We are glad he’s here!  The lesson was outstanding.  We worked on waltz and tango, focusing on body flight and volume, correcting our posture and footwork.  I had no idea it was possible to learn so much in one hour.  I’m eager to practice what we learned today and already excited for next Friday’s lesson.

During the lesson, Wayne was correcting my position in closed hold.  As I shifted in order to “dance it to the left,” my concentration momentarily broke, captured by a sight nearby.  “Hey!” I exclaimed.  “There’s a Chipotle right across the street!”  Wayne burst out laughing.  I tried in vain to reassure him that I would, in fact, choose a lesson with him over a burrito from Chipotle.  I would!  Really!