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Several people asked us for details about our participation in the Atlanta Dance Classic competition next weekend. The venue is the Westin Peachtree Plaza, 210 Peachtree Street, Atlanta 30303. We are dancing several American Smooth heats Friday morning in the 11:00 hour, then we will do our rumba exhibition number during the evening session. There’s no charge for spectator admission during the day but a ticket for the evening session is $35. We’re also dancing American Rhythm during the day Saturday; most of our heats are during the 1:00 hour.

The website for the competition is www.atlantadanceclassic.com. I’ll put this information on our website and also on Facebook. We would love it if you could come and cheer us on! These competitions are always fun, high-energy events. You are sure to see some great dancing!

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I’ve just updated the “Local Dance Opportunities” page with

• 3 special events happening this month,
• the date for this year’s Stars Over Macon in October, and
• a “weekly events” section.

Seriously, if you’re not finding enough times and places to dance around town, maybe you are not trying hard enough.  Or not spending enough time on this website?

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Our class is learning the cha-cha–and also learning how hard it can be to do the steps accurately AND up to tempo. (If they’re anything like me, it’s usually one or the other…) Last night I downloaded my favorite slow/practice cha-cha song. Click and enjoy!

In other news, it became known in class last night that I have never seen Saturday Night Fever.  How egregious is this omission for someone who will watch practically any movie with dancing in it*?  I’ve also never seen Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (whence “Represent Cuba”), but that seems less embarrassing somehow. I have seen Take the Lead, Mad Hot Ballroom, Shall We Dance (both versions), Scent of a Woman, Strictly Ballroom, and numerous ballet movies, good, bad, and indifferent.

Dance-movie suggestions and cult-favorite song choices welcomed in comments.

*Exception: Black Swan, which I am still debating about.

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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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Okay, fans, click through for video of our Smooth heats at this past Saturday’s Garden City Dance Challenge in Augusta.  Tomorrow I’ll post the Rhythm heats and our solo showcase!

Huge thanks to my mom for being our videographer.  Next time we will teach you how to use the zoom and maybe even give you a tripod!

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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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The walls of my childhood ballet studio were decorated with several posters by Harvey Edwards, including one close-up of a man doing a détiré en avant, sweat beaded on his face and hair.  The caption: “Dance is work.”  Eddie Ares’s studio offers this quotation on its website: “Dancers are the athletes of God.”  Even for casual social dancers, ballroom dancing is widely touted as an enjoyable way to get some exercise.

On the other hand, a fair amount of current dance marketing emphasizes the beauty and glamour of dance over its atheticism.  Ballet studios offer “princess camp” or “a visit to Fairyland” summer programs for little girls.  A ballroom studio in Laguna Hills, CA offers “personal instruction and an elegant air. There are fresh roses on the tables and sliced strawberries in the water” (full article here).  The studio hopes to distinguish itself and succeed in a difficult economy by presenting itself as a luxury service provider.

Reading the article, I immediately wondered if the strategy would work.  I also wondered if it should work.  The athleticism of dance is, for me, one of its signal attributes and one of the main things that draws me to it.  Will the little girls who sign up for the visit to Fairyland be disillusioned when they are expected to stand quietly at the barre and follow instructions?  Could new dancers be surprised when they discover that the roses on the tables might be flecked with beads of their sweat at the end of an hour-long lesson?

I love a good workout and I’m always proud to be sweating and sore when my lesson is over.  Do dancers respond more to a physical challenge or to the promise of grace and elegance?  What about people who don’t know yet that they are dancers?  It’s by no means an either/or question; the two qualities reinforce one another.  But I wonder how other dancers see their dancing.  I appreciate the aesthetic aspect but I think I am really addicted to the physical demands and challenges.  Of course, those demands and challenges exist in the service of creating a certain look, and I know I’ve met the challenge when I have the look.

I am going in circles here.  Which reminds me that I need to practice my spiral turns for cha-cha during tonight’s break between classes.

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Everybody remembers this, right?  No?  Okay, to recap: back in late September we were asked to take part in a video shoot that would become part of a big promotional effort for the city of Macon.  We spent a jolly few hours feeling like movie stars but then we had no proof that the whole thing had even happened or was real, because the producers were keeping it so tightly under wraps.  The photographer who shot the stills wouldn’t even sneak us a peek or two via Facebook.  We just had to wait along with the rest of the city, until…

…a few photos came out on Gateway Macon’s Facebook page…

…Then they released the song (free download! get it!)…

…and then I got a message from a friend today “You all look great dancing by the riverfront!”

I fell over myself (in cyberspace? IDK.) going to the Web site to see the video.  We are only in it for a few seconds but we are incredibly pleased and proud all the same.  They have embedding disabled so you have to click up there where it says “the video” or go to gatewaymacon.org or ItsHotterHere.com.

Super exciting!