This is the first example of blues dancing I ever saw, and I fell in love with it immediately.
The rest are videos I came across recently. The next couple videos are from the San Diego Fusion Exchange, so maybe they're not strictly blues (?)... but what I love about blues is that it totally doesn't matter. :]
Man, I love how this woman moves (same woman from the two videos above)...
Gah, 1:16 kills me! So awesome...
Love this one. This woman dances likes her limbs are weightless... beautiful. And the song... mm mm mm...
God, I love her lines at 1:28, and what they do afterwards at 1:34-ish. *_* Gorgeous dancing...
I really like these guys too; their style really appeals to me (and their choice of songs doesn't hurt :]):
Their style is pretty simple on the whole, but the overall feel is cool, and I love the little things they do with their feet (what the dude does at 1:25 *kills* me -- so awesome).
But now here's the interesting thing... Blues, this super free-form style, is making me want to learn technique like I've never wanted to before -- even moreso than when I was doing ballroom. In ballroom, it seems, technique is everything, and you really don't get the feel of the dance unless you're doing it properly. [I say this based solely on the eight-or-so months of ballroom I did, which was the first dancing I'd ever done, so I had nothing at all to compare to at that point. Maybe my impression would be different now... Not that I'm not still a Very Inexperienced Dancer, after only about 1.5 years total. Hehe.. So yeah: tablespoon of salt is warranted here, for sure. That is, don't be fooled into thinking that I know (or think I know) what I'm talking about at all. :P All of my dance-related ramblings are just my personal impressions/thoughts based on my own relatively meagre experience.]
So I was really into working on technique at that time. Once I stopped taking ballroom and was pretty much only dancing salsa socially, at first I really wanted to take salsa lessons to improve, but eventually (probably as my following improved over time, and I could at least squeak by dancing passably with most leads) that desire faded and I just wanted to have fun. Although... I suppose that was part of it, and the other part was that, when I hear salsa music, the way my body feels like moving is often at odds with how salsa styling seems to be commonly taught. (Or I just suck too much at consciously controlling my movements to find out, haha.) In any case, I didn't really feel like taking salsa lessons anymore (which was just as well, since I never did get around to taking any :|!), and since then I've been kind of just messing around on the dance floor, doing whatever the music is making me do (which can feel great, but, as I've written before, has actually become problematic).
But back to blues! So I learn about this whole "blues dancing" thing and fall in love with it instantly, since it's all about dancing the music and moving how you feel. Awesome! But seeing more examples of blues dancing, I see how much more can be expressed through it, and (unlike with salsa) I don't have anywhere close to the vocabulary of movement required to express the things I'm made to feel by the music I'd want to dance blues to. It's like being at a loss for words... like wanting to convey an idea to someone but not knowing how to put it, and watching these awesome videos is like reading something someone else has written that says exactly what you wanted to say, way better than you ever could have put it yourself. It makes me really want to improve my vocabulary and precision of movement, so I can say many more varied and nuanced things through dance.
... Too bad the reasons I never got around to taking salsa lessons when I wanted to still apply (and then some). :| Maybe in the spring I'll be able to squeeze in a lesson or workshop here and there...
No comments:
Post a Comment