Sunday, January 28, 2007

I Didn’t Know My Therapist Was In the Audience

She came up to me afterwards, and I was glad that she had seen me doing something other than sitting in her office whining.

This was the third time my dance partner (not my therapist, though the boundaries do blur) and I did a demonstration as part of a dance event. I was really working on smiling and not acting like I was doing martial arts (see Not the Snake).

My dance partner and I felt good about this performance when it was over, but after watching this video we found lots of things to tighten up for our second performance of the same routine the following Saturday, which went better. Video of that may be posted sometime, but right now it is stuck in media transfer.

Addendum 1/30/07: After watching the tape of the second performance, we are less than thrilled with that too! So we'll leave just the one video up here for now.

Most of these moves are in the Dance Vision (DVIDA) American silver cha-cha syllabus, but we shortened them significantly to make the routine a little more intense. Again, the video is a little smoother on YouTube.



For our next routine, currently in rehearsals, we are really catering our moves to the music more. It will be American tango danced to a highly expressive rendition of “La Cumparasita,” which is probably the tango melody on your cell phone. We are drawing on the DVIDA American silver tango syllabus but really using just pieces of those moves and combining them with ideas from television dance shows, my partner’s jazz background, and a little inspiration from Argentine tango. Since it has so much that is off-syllabus, I have had to chart the moves on a spreadsheet where each square is one beat, and there are eight beats to a measure. My dance partner thinks the spreadsheet is nuts. I say it is yet another good reason to have invented written communication. Like the Magna Carta and other important documents, it helps to settle differences between the parties involved.

2 comments:

Stew said...

Wow. You're really good. I'm much more of a (currently way out of shape and out of practice) bar dancing machine. Once I danced with a guy who had tears tattooed under his eyes. I didn't know what that meant, though.

Elrond Hubbard said...

Stew and Phil, thanks for the kind words!