I'm such a sucker for a Waltz

Spent some focused time waltzing last night in preparation for an upcoming seekrit projeckt.  Some notes to myself.

Turning your box happens on side-together (2-3 and 5-6), not the forward/back steps (1 and 3).  I have a tendency to curve my backstep in particular.  I don't even think about it, now I have to.  Which resulted in some confused leads yesterday evening.

Leading on twinkle is a lot about rise and fall and planting us both on the landing on count 3, creating an opportunity for my partner to change weight and be on the proper foot.  My partner kept ending up on the wrong foot, and having a hard time distinguishing between my leads for twinkle and for promenade hesitation.  You'll say (and I was tempted to) "well, can't she count, can't she pay attention to what half of the box she is in" and the answer is yes she can, and maybe she should.  But If I'm going to become the dancer I want to be, my leads must be definitive and unmistakeable, and I have to know at all times what beat we're on and where in the box we are, and tell her all of that with my body.  Being indecisive and unclear is not acceptable.

Leading promenade is about right turning action with my right arm, and possibly about a little positive pressure with my left to snuggle her in as my right arm rotates.  Plus, I really, really need to consistently lead or signal with my head.  Not only does it help my partner, but it looks fabulous.  And we want to look fabulous.

And I'm still working on automating rise and fall.

I'm listening deliberately and consciously to a lot of waltzes these days.  Thank god for amazon mp3 sales/downloads and for YouTube.  There are just so many waltzes I love, and so much of the music I love, and react most emotionally to, is waltz music.  I'm starting to really wonder how much the song, the lyrics, the instrumentation even matters - whether it's just the waltz rhythm and the feeling of motion and flow and romance it inspires in me.  In other words, I thought I liked, and was moved by particular songs, but now that I notice they're all waltzes, maybe it's not the individual song I like, maybe it's the category "waltz music".  To wit, some of my favorite waltzes include:

Saturday Sun - Nick Drake - Most of Nick Drake's stuff is pleasantly depressive and morose, but this piece is wistful and romantic and hopeful.  Turns out it's a waltz.

Sweet Baby James - This seemingly simple song is surprisingly moving, and turns out it's a waltz.

Play me - Neil Diamond - There are about 4  or 5 Neil Diamond songs that I like moderately well.  This one is by far the most moving.  It's a waltz.

Valz after Jan-Olof Olsson - JPP   JPP are a Finnish folk group that I ran into at a folk music festival I attended with a friend.  There are a bunch of fiddlers, a bassist, and they often use a nyckelharpa, which is like a keyed fiddle with drone strings (I swear it's true - google it) that make it sound a lot like a set of bagpipes.  Plus, it looks like a bear to tune.  Anyway, these guys were fiddling along and I was enjoying it moderately well, but nothing particular was standing out.  Then they started this tune that began with a lone nyckelharpa singing out wistfully, and when the other fiddlers and  bassist joined in, it was like blown-away man.  The sound and emotion hit me in the chest and woke me up and I was suddenly and very emotionally engaged.  Turns out the Finnish word is "Valz"...


Take it to the Limit - Eagles - I'm a big Eagles fan, this is one of my favorites.  Waltz.




Blue Spanish Sky - Chris Isaak   I'm a Chris Isaak fan too, but favorites... Waltz.


If you Don't Know Me By Now - Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, or Simply Red, or Seal, or many others.  Let's just say I don't even know any other songs by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (I don't think...), but...   Waltz.

Nothing Else Matters - Metallica  Far and away my favorite Metallica tune.  Waltz

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald - Gordon Lightfoot.  I didn't know I cared so deeply about the Great Lakes maritime tradition, and the risks that merchant mariners take in the name of commerce.  Maybe it's just the fact that it's  a waltz.  Actually, it's a *Viennese* waltz which is like the triple espresso of waltzes (so are a bunch of the above....)

The Rainbow Connection - Kermit the frog.  Seriously?  I'm getting a little emotional over a song by a muppet???  I blame the waltz.




Natural Woman - Aretha Franklin
Come Away with Me - Norah Jones
Moon River - Andy Williams
Iris - Goo Goo Dolls
(I can't help) Falling in Love with You - Elvis
Eidelweiss and My Favorite Things - The Sound of Music (Viennese, naturally)
Lara's Theme - Dr Zhivago
Time in a Bottle - Jim Croce
Kiss From a Rose - Seal
Que Sera, Sera - Doris Day (Viennese)
You Light Up my Life - Everybody
Three Times a Lady - Commodores
House of the Rising Sun - Animals
Annie's Song - John Denver (Viennese)
Themes from Romeo and Juliet, The Godfather, The Cider House Rules, even Finding Nemo

If you want a romantic, wistful, moving, flowing song with a lot of momentum (emotional and physical), you want a waltz.

Let's play "name that Dance tune"

I've started to get a few dances under my belt, which means I always want to play "name that dance" every time any song comes on.  My friends are quite patient with me and haven't busted my chops too hard for playing a quiz game nobody else can play.  Or wants to.  Or even wants to watch me play by myself...  One friend encourages me and actually asks questions occasionally - if he's not careful he's going to end up in a dance class...

Of course, when I say "a few dances", I mean it.  Nearly everything sounds like a cha-cha (which I don't even dance at all, really, but it's a very versatile and common rhythm), or an east coast swing, or a salsa or a rumba.  Except the waltzes, of course.  Anyway, I definitely need more breadth of dances.  Of course, I really want to get a lot better at the dances I actually do dance.  More lessons! 

One of the instructors mentioned how useful cha-cha was with rock and pop songs, and I started hearing that (and couldn't stop...). I'm also loving Jitterbug and east coast swing - I come closer to getting out of my head with those than any other dance, so I'm hearing those a lot too.  Cha-cha and East Coast swing cover a similar range of tempos and both have a triple step in them, so a lot of the time I hear both.  Sometimes I think of East coast swing as a pair of Siamese cha-cha twins joined in the middle.  That probably is a 100% private joke...  As well as politically incorrect.

For me, the distinction between a cha cha and and East coast swing comes down to feel - the more latin a song feels, the more likely it is to be cha-cha; if  it's got a straight-ahead rock swing it feels like East coast swing.  My current examples are "Moves like Jagger" by Maroon 5 is a cha cha, and "My Body" by Young the Giant feels more like an East Coast Swing. Lots of songs feel like they might be either one. Of course, if it REALLY swings (and it's a bit slower), now we're talking foxtrot.  But you don't hear many of those out in the world,  or at least I don't.  Maybe I ought to hang out with the hipsters, they appreciate Sinatra, right?

Salsa and rumba overlap a lot in tempo too, I'm somewhat surprised to notice how fast a rumba can get and still fit.  The classic rumbas are "And I love her" by the Beatles, or "Stand by me" by Ben E King, but I just heard "I kissed a girl" by Katy Perry and it seemed like I could rumba to it (though I did not rumba around the restaurant and test it out...)  But most of the overlap here, for me, is tempo.  In rhythm, syncopation, and feel, songs are either rumbas or salsas.   "black horse and cherry  tree" by KT Tunstall is playing right now, and it feels much more like a salsa than a rumba.

OK, they followed that up with "Party Rock Anthem" by LMFAO which reminds me that all house and techno everywhere ends up being a merengue.  Probably not the most appropriate dance, but it's the dance I know.  Every Day I'm Shufflin'.

Turkish Rumba

I went to a Rumba group class taught by the young Turk recently.  He's a piece of work - he started at the studio after I did, but he was dedicated, focused and single minded (I'm generally... not so much), and now he's an instructor.  He's clearly a natural athlete (which I am not - more about that later) and a natural or very learned performer (also, me, not).  Don't get me wrong, he put in the time and worked his ass off and deserves it.  He's also a good teacher.  Lots of natural athletes can do it right after seeing it a few times, but can't break it down, analyze and articulate it, and talk about it to a nerdy, all-up-in-my-head learner like me.  Lest you think I have a crush on him, I'll just mention he talks really really fast.  Maybe he's talking as fast as he learned.  I kept waiting for my brain to catch up with his words.  Not even the concepts or an understanding, just the words.... 

It was an intense class - we definitely got our money's worth. He expects you to learn fast too.  He covered a fairly long series in a single class.  I felt like I was a little behind and never quite catching up all class, but I never felt like I'd completely lost sight of him.  As soon as I started feeling like the footwork was coming along he was talking about frame and leading and using the floor and cuban motion.  But if we started thinking about that too much and lost the basic footwork, he dropped all that, declared it optional, and hit the basics again.  Intimidating, but we really did cover a lot of ground.

I also took a class on "dancing with emotion" that he taught.  He says it's a class he finds challenging to teach, and it's incredibly challenging to learn, for me personally.  I'm usually up in my head and thinking about footwork, leading, frame, floorcraft, and a million other things.  I've gotten feedback on my dancing that uses words like "distant" and "platonic", and I was not dancing with my sister at the time.  I have a very easy time getting up in my head and a very hard time getting in my body.  And an even harder time getting out and making a connection with my dance partner.  Having a million details that want to be in my head and aren't automatic in my body doesn't help.  The only thing that's automatic is beat, and I still manage to get onto the wrong foot and have to restart that once in a while.  But all this is between me and my partner.  There have been a couple of exceptions, but...

The Turk used Rumba which he characterized, wonderfully, as "the pillow talk dance", and Argentine tango.  The point of the Argentine tango, I think, was to free us from the straightjacket of rhythm, and let us move and feel, feel and move.  Of course, for me, rhythm isn't a straightjacket, it's a comfy tee shirt I wear all the time.  On the other hand, the rhythm in my body is definitely something I lean on, and not having to think about rhythm isn't sufficient to get me out making a connection with my partner.  Maybe knocking away that crutch was helpful.

Of course, I've had no Argentine tango, so for the most part it was just a new set of footwork for me to distract/occupy/obsess myself with.  Not good for connecting to my partner.  But that's me, I'd have found another excuse not to connect.

And connecting with a partner is very much the point, and the challenge for me.  If she's not there and real and human, and I'm not aware of her body, I can't lead, I can't respond to where she's at, I can't guide and protect and display her as I should, and desire. And we're both missing most of the fun.

Not to mention, connecting with my partner is the point in other, deeper ways.

Samba Workshop

I attended a Samba workshop, though Samba is not on my current curriculum.  Well, at least it wasn't. 

Like all human endeavors, dancing is fractally detailed. There is an infinite amount to learn about a near infinite different kinds of dances.

There's no time to learn it all, unless you learn awfully fast.

Waltz - Promenade and Twinkle

So here's the data dump on my Waltz group class the other night.

It was a fairly full and almost perfectly balanced class, we were short one lady. We spent the first half of class working on promenade - most of us had some familiarity with the move, but we all could use work on it. The latter part of the class we spent on twinkle and left and right twinkle (or as we called the move, "George"...) I hadn't been exposed to twinkle and left and right twinkle, but I managed to pick up the basics and footwork fairly quickly. Just the last half of promenade, starting at the other end of the box, on the other foot. The nuggets I was most in need of were those having to do with my frame and lead.

The mantra "nose and toes" is something I'd heard before, and my interpretation is that the point is to signal definitively with your head and toes, without getting your hips too much out of square. I definitely have a tendency to not lead the promenade with my head, and one of my partners really helped me understand how important that is to her following, because she just had a much harder time following when I got sloppy with my head. The other thing I need to remind myself is that it also looks fabulous.

The Young Turk really helped us pay attention to what the leader's right arm was doing during the "nose and toes" setup phase of promenade/twinkle. I'd been elongating my frame somewhat, but TYT pointed out that the gentlemen should actually be executing a right turning action with his right arm, resulting in a lady that's slightly more behind in frame, and slightly pivoted open - set up perfectly for promenade. Plus she ends up cradled in your right arm which gives her the stable, supportive structure she needs to really cut loose on her develope'.

The other thing that seemed to help a lot is my focusing on maintaining a positive connection with my left hand. The right turning action and frame elongation often felt like I was taking away the strong connection we had, and a positive left hand connection made that feel much more secure and definitive. This also made it feel like I was shifting slightly inside a strong, stable frame rather than it feeling sloppy.

Social dancing and group classes

So I haven't been blogging for a long time much at all. I keep wanting to make these deep, thoughtful, insightful posts, and there's not a lot of that going on in my dancing. Maybe there never was. Lately, I've been dancing a lot (which is better than blogging about it, I think you'll agree), but I'm trying to keep all the action in my body rather than being all up in my head. Or at least, these are my excuses for not blogging. I've got drafts of nine "deep" posts, I swear.  But then, I've had them all for months, so...

I've decided just to blog everything and quit holding out for significance. So here are some random notes from recent group classes.

Lately, I'm trying to participate on all the group classes that cover what I think of as socially useful dances: Salsa, Rumba, Country, and (to a lesser extent) Swing and Foxtrot. How is this different than just going to ALL the group classes, you ask?

Well, first of all, I'm not going when the dance is totally new to me, which happens with what strikes me as surprising frequency. There's a bunch of dances in the world, and they offer most of them. Cha Cha, Samba, Quickstep, Paso Doble, Jive, Hustle, Argentine Tango, Viennese Waltz and Bolero are all stuff I've recently skipped. I probably should add Cha Cha at some point relatively soon, as there's a lot of Cha Cha-able music out there - lots of pop and rock, which surprised me.

Secondly, Before the "Socially useful" dance push, I was spending most of my time on Waltz and Tango, just because I love them so much. And down that same path I could see Viennese Waltz, Argentine Tango, and Bolero looming. Since my one of my main goals is explicitly social, it was clear I needed to emphasize the social dances more than I had been. Tango is definitely a "dancer's dance", and though waltz is fairly social, I need more venue options than Italian weddings. I think I have a lot more to say about the social vs beloved dichotomy, but if I let this post go to long, I'll trap myself in a rewriting/editing cycle, so set that aside for now.

Two Step: It was a small class, I was happy to know about two figures that my partner didn't (not bragging - the score was about four figures for me versus her two). I tried them on her anyway during warm-up, on the theory that if I timed them right, and led them definitively enough, it would all work out fine. That was interesting and instructive if not totally successful.

We did basic underarm turn right, and underarm sweetheart turn (which was new to me). We also did Promenade (new to me, very fox-trotty, unsurprisingly) and a couple of un-sweetheart turns (hey, it's my blog, I get to invent terms for things that have official names if I want to. Especially if I don't remember them). Anyway, I pretty much know one easy, basic way to half turn my partner out of sweetheart, and I've been briefly exposed to a much flashier, turn and a half version, but I know I couldn't do it without at least referring to my notes and maybe not even then.

Rumba class:  This was a pretty full class, and everybody there was pretty experienced, for a basics class. There was one person who was even less experienced than me, but he was game and so Dance-Sama took that as permission to pile on a bunch of stuff. We are working over several weeks toward an extended series, that starts with Basic, Cross Body Lead, Open Breaks, Underarm Turn / 5th Position Break, Swivel Promenade. Yes, she covered all that in one class.

This was a lot for me to take in, but it's starting to make sense, I'm starting to have some body intuition regarding dancing. I've done cross body lead in Salsa and Rumba, and it's starting to make sense that in Rumba I need the forward step that precedes the Salsa version in order to get the forward and back motion that Salsa gives you for free. Doesn't mean my body will remember to do it, but it's a start.

I'd seen most of the other figures before, so nothing earth shattering, and I certainly could use all the practice I can get. The Swivel Promenade was new, and we barely got to that in the time we had. I stayed after and practiced a little, with a partner initially, then alone.

The other insight was Dance-Sama made me feel the correct posture (or at least a better posture) for Rumba (and probably for life - I tend to have the typical nerd's horrible posture). Shoulders back, everything else in and up and slightly forward. I'm working on making that habitual.

Waltz class tonight. Social and beloved. A two-fer!

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is a Viennese waltz.

It came on pandora and I just clicked.  If not for dancing, I never would have realized that.