Catch up wks !

Ceroc night

catch up on a few weeks:

After the ceroc night we had a week at Ballroom Blitz in Hollywood.  there the room was full to capacity, and we did some basic Chacha - a different dance and a different dance teaching with the importance of moving to a particular place and posture to a specific beat in the music.  the rhythm of the dance is different.

There were too many women so i opted to follow with a dance friend: it was interesting seeing how much in connection i had to be with her leading rather than with the music when i was leading.  we swapped backwards and forwards and when i was following, i had to be concentrating and aware of her lead, her movement of the body and thence mine.  when i was leading i was concentrating upon the music and the beat and the step more so than the connection with my dance partner.

I came back a few weeks later and found that i knew the steps, this giving me the chance to refine and concentrate upon the teacher's own movements and to copy them through the mirrors as much as possible.  numbers were down following the recent troubles in the province.

The dance practices for the wedding dance are continuing and we now have 2x2 minute routines to dance to - chacha and salsa.  at first it felt like they went on for a long time, but now we are very used to them, having repeated them about 40+ times such that we are running through them by rote - concentrating upon future moves rather than the next move or the one we are in, and we feel that it is over very quickly.  this has kept me out of the social dancing a bit in the evenings, but given me a better sleep/waking pattern for work!  its a different way of dancing - and certainly there is more of a relationship from knowing the person you are dancing with from the time spent together - but less so from the dancing as we sometimes go into autopilot.

This weekend there was a Dancesport social night in Short's Social Club: it was mostly geared to beginners, and the more experienced dancers were assisting informally are the couples rotated.  one interesting observation - one that i was a party to myself - was a sudden enlivening of the atmosphere.  it came from a song which everyone knew and could sing to, and also tap or stamp out the beat - 'She's the belle of Belfast City'!