The UN-natural Athlete

I'm not a natural athlete, though I've known a few.  I met another just the other day.

I spent a few years kayaking and the basic skill there is the eskimo roll.  It took me months and months of pool practice to learn this, and when I tried it on the river it fell apart again and I had to rebuild it.  Now I've got one of the most reliable, versatile, powerful, dependable rolls of almost anybody I know;  I can do either side, with or without a paddle, even after bouncing over a rocky bottom on my helmet, in adverse currents, whatever.

In Colorado, I once had my paddle knocked out of my hands underwater, so I hands-rolled up, and went about an hour of class II-III water without my paddle, never worrying about getting back up on top of my boat (I even found my paddle in an eddy at the take out - it was a very good day...).  One of my paddling buddies used to joke that I was more comfortable under the water than on top of it, and my girlfriend at the time used to call me "speaker to trout".  They weren't entirely wrong.

So, awesome roll, but getting it there took a lot of learning, thinking-through, and practice.  Most of the people in my college kayaking class seemed similar, though several did learn much faster than me.  I thought that's just how it was.

One night I was teaching someone a roll at a pool session at the local whitewater club, and this dude with the weirdest collection of yard-sale boating gear you ever saw paddled up, said his name was Ed, and asked if I could show him how to roll.  I started in on my standard disclaimer how this takes a while, you gotta practice, you won't get it tonight, it takes time, blah blah blah - I didn't want him to be discouraged.  He interrupted me and said "just show me".  Well, I'm describing what to do while I'm demonstrating with my boat, paddle, body position, etc.  Halfway through that, he took a big breath and dived underneath his boat and started trying it.  He fumbled around a bit, tried once and failed, and then he just ripped off one of the nicest rolls I'd ever seen, on his second try.  Five minutes later he was rolling on the other side.  We ended up boating together for years.  Predictably, he rapidly became better than me. I watched him learning - he'd just see someone do something he wanted to learn and his eyes seemed to pour it right into his muscles without the long, distracting stop in his brain.

I know dancers like that, and they amaze me just like Ed did, but I don't seem to learn that way.  You have to point out to me that I'm not turning my foot out, and that if I do, it's more stable.  I need to have a conversation about that, I need the words to intellectualize around.  I spend some time noticing that I'm still not turning out my foot, and I have to periodically abandon all my other dancing while I focus on turning my foot out.  (ladies, if your leader goes blank, he may be having a similar challenge).  Then I need to practice that a lot while thinking about it - at first it takes nearly all my attention, then this fades to where it's only moderately consuming, and finally it's automatic and I can worry about something else.  Most of my time on the dance floor I'm like a time-sharing computer, switching my attention and the conversation in my head between body mechanics, footwork, lead, planning for future figures, navigation, seeing what's going on around me, and floorcraft.  Only after quite a bit of that does it become automatic.  Shortly thereafter, it gets boring (which means I need to start attending to my partner....)

As I build up a larger repertoire of learned tidbits in dance, I am learning faster, but I'm still going through this process, I'm just relating it back to something similar I've already learned.  I still don't seem to go straight from seeing something to doing it, I just have a shorter conversation in my head that goes something like "Remember the waltz box?  Well, same thing here in rumba, except....".

At least I figured out how I learn, and how to speed that process along:

1.  I'm verbal and language oriented.  Talk about dancing details with my dance nerd friends, read books and blogs and watch youtubes.

2.  Go ahead and have the conversation in your head.  Try not to get too wrapped up in it while you're actually dancing.

3.  Go to lots of classes and private lessons.  Once you get bored, find more challenging classes.

4.  Lots of practice.

5.  Try to focus on just a few dances for a while, so you can build rather than just skipping around.

6. Argentine Tango

7.  Ex-russian ballet dancer instructors

More about those last two soon.

The hardest move in dancing

is stepping onto the dance floor.  In public.

For me, anyway.

One of the reasons I resisted learning to dance for so long, and so stubbornly is my vanity.  I hate to fail.  I particularly hate to fail in public.

 

That's also the main reason I started by taking lessons at the dance studio rather than just showing up at the dance club and trying to copy the moves.  Or going to dancing meetups and learning there.  Or free lessons at the local honky-tonk.  The Dance studio is still my main outlet, though.

The more people are there, the less comfortable I am.  The more I feel they are watching me, the less comfortable I am.   The better the other dancers are, the less comfortable I am. 

If the other dancers are drunk, that helps me a bit, sad to say.  If I feel like I'm pretty decent at the dance in question, that helps too.  If I feel like I'm better than the average other dancer who's there, that helps.   Told you I was vain.

That "feeling confident about a dance" thing is recent. And fleeting.  Right now the chances of running into a better dancer (or several) at any random venue is essentially 100%.  And that's at the country place, where dancing is playing third fiddle to drinking and carousing.  In a Salsa club, very nearly every single person there is not only better than I am, but a LOT bett er than I am.  Some of them are stratospherically better.  Those people are SERIOUS about dancing and basically don't drink (which, I'm told, is why "Lets have a Salsa night" is often the last desperate act of a bar that's slowly dying...  I believe it too, the bar where I got hooked by the DanceEvangelista is now a Mexican Restaurant)

 I know there are people that are comfortable in the spotlight, I've met them.  Some I admire, others intimidate me, others just seem like some kind of alien.

But it's not me.  When I take the Meyers-Briggs personality test I score 75-85% Introverted.  And I've learned recently that I've got a triple threat - I'm Introverted, Quiet, and Shy.  Plus I'm definitely not a naturally graceful, instinctive athlete.  Quadruple threat.

Heck, I'm most nearly comfortable with private lessons (one person watching me fail, and she's a professional being paid to be understanding), less comfortable with group lessons (there's like 8 or 10 people in there!), even less comfortable with practice parties at the dance studio (a couple of dozen people, some of whom are VERY good dancers), and least comfortable with dancing in Real Life (panic!).  I've spent hours at dancing venues where people are dancing and all I can bring myself to do is watch.  I got into a conversation about this the other night at a swing dance when a woman noticed that I was mostly watching, and asked me about it.  She approached me, of course.  We had a nice chat, I'm pretty comfortable with words...

The best way to estimate how painful this is, is, notice how much the dance studios can charge for their services, their expertise, and most of all, their emotionally safe learning environment.   People say all sorts of things, but their true feelings are shown by how they spend their money.  And I'm happy to pay it, I prefer it to the many free options available.  Still, I think this price is actually is a low estimate.  I spent years avoiding social venues in general, and dancing specifically, rather than pay the cost in money and feeling uncomfortable.  That's cost me more than my dance hall dues, and there's no way to quantify that.

But I'm working on it.  Even just trying different studios, with different people is a challenge, but I'm doing it.  I've joined a couple of dancing clubs and I'm going to their classes and events.  I even did a couple of performance pieces at my home dance studio a few months back, and I've got another coming up (yes, I need to blog about this, but this is, in fact, one of several things that have kept me too busy to blog....)    I'm trying to get out to social dances regularly, and for the most part, I'm there (Often, I'm there standing with my back against the wall, but I'm there....)

There is no way around.  The only way is through.