Ballroom and Latin Dancing- 10 months on

Since Christmas, we have been in the improvers class and WOW. The difference. Some people in that class have been there 2 years! They dance and you just want to stop and watch them move. Four of us progressed on from the beginner class to the improvers class this semester, but we really are quite far behind in comparison. In many of the dances we have a lot of catching up to do. This semester we learned rumba, which I love, and it’s quite different from everything else we have done so far. The pace of the improvers class is much faster, and I feel like we’ve learned so much since Christmas. My usual dance partner wasn't there one day, so for the first time since I started, I was actually dancing with a man, as a woman! While in theory this sounded good, he kept complaining about my trying to lead...

No, this is not me, but this is a snap from our class!

We added new steps to our quickstep - the lock-step and pivot turn - which we still don’t have quite right so it looks a bit clunky. The cha cha is still probably one of my favourites because it's so up-beat. We got to add a new step called the cross-basic in the cha cha, which is taking a while to get the hang of. Since Christmas we have also spent much more time on swing dancing, and added a new step called the American Spin which is good fun but it makes you so dizzy after a while! It’s one of the only dances where I do the woman’s part, so a few times I got to dance with the teacher, and she's so amazing it's kind of scary to be her dance partner. We added in a "conversation piece" to the Foxtrot as well, so it's nice to have something new in there. When I switched to Monday classes one night, some other people in the class thought I had been doing dance for ages, which was a nice compliment to get.

Towards the end we had a very quick introduction to samba, which I would really like to learn more of because I love the music for it. We also did a "Yearning Saunter" which I think definitely wins the award for the poshest dance title! It is a strange sequence dance that feels as though it belongs in an Austen film adaptation. (I realise that all makes it sound interesting but really it’s more of a yawning saunter).

Before starting dance this year, I had never really grasped how much you have to use your brain for it. And a different part of the brain than usual, at that. But it really is the case that as soon as you start over-thinking the dance steps, you suddenly can't do it anymore. I imagine come September we will have forgotten a lot of what we have learned. The four of us who progressed from the beginner to the improvers class since Christmas are all planning to go back in September, which will be lovely. And I must say I am actually glad now that I learned the man's part, because otherwise it is very easy to allow yourself to be led, and never really learn the steps independently, but learning both parts means I am able to teach other people how to do the same dances.


PS: I have yet again- obviously- failed to take any pictures to actually show I do any of this (sorry). For the end of the Gaisce challenge, I do need to hand in a portfolio with pictures/videos of my various activities, so if anyone wants to volunteer to learn all of these dances and pose for pictures, let me know :P