I've been having nightmares lately. The kind where you wake up, and this awful feeling of residual fear or dread or anxiety stays with you well after you've gotten out of bed and begun to go about your day. I haven't had nightmares in many months — at least — and I don't remember ever having ones like this, that affect me long after I wake up. Part of me wonders why I've been having them all of a sudden, and part of me doesn't want to think about it.
Drag blues feels amazing. It reminds me of ballroom, and I miss ballroom. Specifically it reminds me of tango, and I think it's because of the nature of the connection. A lot of the lead/follow seems to rely not on the arms at all, but rather on connection through the legs and torso. I really like it... perhaps not surprisingly, considering that my arms are pretty much the bane of my dancing existence. (Sigh.) In any case, I'm dying to learn more blues. I think it's already changing my dancing in general. I've hardly been out dancing salsa lately, but recently I danced a really great bachata (with a ballroom instructor, incidentally), and it felt different from the last time I danced with him — certain things felt easier and more natural to follow, more effortless... and from the feel of those things, it was definitely a direct result of the drag blues workshops I did not long ago (taught by some amazing instructors from Denver).
I need to develop more discipline (i.e., an amount greater than zero). I know I have enough time to do a good number of the things I want to be doing these days without continually getting myself sick (I've long since lost count of the number of times I've been sick since last summer... it is definitely greater than eight), but I've barely been accomplishing anything, and it's really starting to bother me. I'm barely treading water, let alone getting anywhere. I seem to have completely lost the ability to be productive on a regular day. This is not sustainable. I fear the only solution is sheer will power.
Eu não vivo onde moro; eu não moro onde vivo. I feel like my life is in one place, and my home and school are in another. I don't think it's going to change any time soon. Part of me is scared by that thought; part of me wants to be fine with it. Fortunately(?), if I keep myself busy enough, I manage not to think about this or its implications and just enjoy what I have at the moment.
Showing posts with label ballroom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ballroom. Show all posts
Friday, April 30, 2010
Thursday, March 4, 2010
More on blues dancing... and (learning) dance of various sorts
I am currently super-hyped about the chance to blues dance again in the (very) near future, particularly after watching a bunch of great videos of blues dancing the other day.
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...
Saturday, October 24, 2009
My feet's first steps into the world of dance (Part I)
About a year and one month ago, I started dancing: completely out of the blue, I was invited by a friend to a free beginners' salsa lesson at a local venue, and I had an amazing time despite struggling with the basic step, let alone a right-hand turn. Dancing was something that I'd wished I could do since forever, but it was always that far-off sort of wish, like "Man, I wish I could play the piano..." I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't have taken that first step any time soon if it hadn't been for this, so I'm really, really happy that, that first evening, I'd happened to be feeling miserable enough that I'd badly needed a pick-me-up, but not quite so miserable that I would turn down doing something so randomly spontaneous despite it sounding like it'd be fun.
We started taking lessons the next week.
There isn't much of a salsa scene in my city (and practically nowhere to learn it), so we signed up at a nearby ballroom studio that my friend knew of and started learning almost a dozen different ballroom dances, including salsa. I loved it. Together, we were mostly interested in learning Latin dances (salsa, bachata, merengue, mambo, cha-cha, samba, rumba...), but I absolutely loved waltz and tango as well (and, though I got only a tiny taste of them, Viennese waltz and Argentine tango were even more amazing).
When I started taking lessons, I went in my everyday footwear, which happened to look like this (minus the grimy crap on the toes, which they acquired this past summer):
I've always had a problem finding comfortable shoes for reasons that I'm still not quite sure of (I suspect it has something to do with my arches, or lack thereof, and the fact that my feet are long mostly because I have long toes), so when I stumble upon a pair of shoes that are actually comfortable, I will wear them *everywhere*. So I love these shoes, and it's a good thing that I generally dress very casually (read: jeans + tank/tee/sweater/hoodie), because, well, they're very casual. But what's more, being runners, they *suck* for spinning... uh... and for dancing in general. So, after a couple months of taking lessons, I reluctantly set about finding myself some dance shoes.
Now, I thought I'd always had problems finding regular shoes... turns out those problems did not begin to compare to the impossibility of finding Latin ballroom shoes (not even taking into account that, because they are handmade and generally imported from overseas, there are only a handful of stores in Ontario that sell them, almost all of which are in the GTA... which is a drivable-but-certainly-not-convenient 1-2 hours from where I live).
Latin ballroom shoes seem to take innumerable forms, but tend to look something like this:
The important features to note are that they are (a) high-heeled, (b) strappy, and (c) open-toe (unless they are practice shoes), and each of these aspects can be problematic to dancers with non-average feet. For me, (a) was primarily a nuisance, but a tolerable one. I don't typically wear heels, and when I do, it's for some particular occasion -- and then my feet are assured a nice restful return to the world of flats, where they can proceed to recover from the traumatic experience. This doesn't work so well when you're dancing almost every day, but this problem seemed relatively unavoidable, so I took the "suck it up and deal" approach.
The variety resulting from (b) contributes greatly to the innumerable forms that Latin shoes can take. There's the traditional strap, the T-strap, the cross-strap (around the ankle or around the arch), the double cross-strap, and then miscellaneous variations of the above. I didn't expect that this would be a major consideration for me until I tried on several pairs of shoes and came to the realization that I don't have "big" feet, as I'd always thought (I'm 5'6" and I wear a size 9): I have *long* feet (as mentioned, primarily because I have long toes, which comes back to bite me in the butt for (c)). My feet, not to mention my ankles, are actually pretty damn scrawny. This means that, in order for my foot to actually remain secured in the shoe, my foot itself, not just my ankle, must be tethered down, making the last two options (around-arch cross-strap and double cross-strap) the only viable ones for me. (Ironically, the T-strap style, designed to better hold the foot in the shoe, is actually far worse for my scrawny feet than the traditional strap alone: the T-strap part, connecting the ankle strap to the front of the shoe means that you can only tighten the ankle strap so much before you start contorting the shoe in bizarre ways... i.e., I can't tighten them nearly enough to actually secure my ankle, let alone the rest of my foot.)
But (a) and (b) pale in comparison to (c), which ends up conferring the most impossibility to the task of finding a shoe that fits me. As a rule, larger shoe sizes mean bigger shoes -- not just longer, but also wider and deeper (or "taller", as the case may be). As I said, my feet are scrawny, but they are also flat, in more ways than one. The front couple inches of my feet consist pretty much solely of my stupid, long toes, which, also being scrawny, are not particularly tall... and so my toes slide right through the vast majority of open-toe shoes and onto the floor. This is obviously bad. The fitters at every shoe store I've been to therefore tell me that I need narrow (or extra-narrow) width shoes, so I won't slide through. But my feet are in fact not only average width, but my arches collapse (as opposed to having rigid flat feet), so when I'm standing, my feet are even wider still around the (non-)arch. So narrow-width shoes are too narrow behind the ball of my foot and cut into my feet, yet they're often still too loose around the toe to fit like a glove, as dance shoes ought to. Really, what I need is a shoe that's normal width, but has less of the top material, making for a "flatter" shoe. Unfortunately, they do not make shoes in varying flatnesses. :\
Despite all this, at the second dance shoe store I visited in my search, I found these:
And they were exactly what I was looking for, and best of all (and more importantly), by some strange miracle, they *fit perfectly*. And I didn't even have too much trouble dancing in the 2.8-inch heel, though it would've taken some getting used to to become really comfortable with it.
But it was not to be... after dancing in them a couple of times, once or twice for one hour, and then once for two or three, I couldn't feel my toes. At all. Except for this weird tingly sensation when I wiggled them just right. At first I kind of thought it was the cold (it was freezing out around this time), but no. A weekend went by, and still no feeling had returned. Then a week, then two. And then I just accepted that I no longer had feeling in my toes. I think it was a full two months later that I eventually realized I could feel my toes again.
Now, I liked these shoes so much that I was tempted to just wear them anyway and give up feeling my toes forever. But it was somewhere around this time that my teacher was starting to put more emphasis on proper technique... and apparently my feet are configured such that when I put my weight on the inside of the ball of my foot (as one must in Latin ballroom) while wearing heels over 2 inches, some bone in the ball of my foot is perfectly positioned to crush the hell out of some adjacent nerve, which... hurts. A lot.
So my search for dance shoes continued...
We started taking lessons the next week.
There isn't much of a salsa scene in my city (and practically nowhere to learn it), so we signed up at a nearby ballroom studio that my friend knew of and started learning almost a dozen different ballroom dances, including salsa. I loved it. Together, we were mostly interested in learning Latin dances (salsa, bachata, merengue, mambo, cha-cha, samba, rumba...), but I absolutely loved waltz and tango as well (and, though I got only a tiny taste of them, Viennese waltz and Argentine tango were even more amazing).
When I started taking lessons, I went in my everyday footwear, which happened to look like this (minus the grimy crap on the toes, which they acquired this past summer):
I've always had a problem finding comfortable shoes for reasons that I'm still not quite sure of (I suspect it has something to do with my arches, or lack thereof, and the fact that my feet are long mostly because I have long toes), so when I stumble upon a pair of shoes that are actually comfortable, I will wear them *everywhere*. So I love these shoes, and it's a good thing that I generally dress very casually (read: jeans + tank/tee/sweater/hoodie), because, well, they're very casual. But what's more, being runners, they *suck* for spinning... uh... and for dancing in general. So, after a couple months of taking lessons, I reluctantly set about finding myself some dance shoes.
Now, I thought I'd always had problems finding regular shoes... turns out those problems did not begin to compare to the impossibility of finding Latin ballroom shoes (not even taking into account that, because they are handmade and generally imported from overseas, there are only a handful of stores in Ontario that sell them, almost all of which are in the GTA... which is a drivable-but-certainly-not-convenient 1-2 hours from where I live).
The important features to note are that they are (a) high-heeled, (b) strappy, and (c) open-toe (unless they are practice shoes), and each of these aspects can be problematic to dancers with non-average feet. For me, (a) was primarily a nuisance, but a tolerable one. I don't typically wear heels, and when I do, it's for some particular occasion -- and then my feet are assured a nice restful return to the world of flats, where they can proceed to recover from the traumatic experience. This doesn't work so well when you're dancing almost every day, but this problem seemed relatively unavoidable, so I took the "suck it up and deal" approach.
The variety resulting from (b) contributes greatly to the innumerable forms that Latin shoes can take. There's the traditional strap, the T-strap, the cross-strap (around the ankle or around the arch), the double cross-strap, and then miscellaneous variations of the above. I didn't expect that this would be a major consideration for me until I tried on several pairs of shoes and came to the realization that I don't have "big" feet, as I'd always thought (I'm 5'6" and I wear a size 9): I have *long* feet (as mentioned, primarily because I have long toes, which comes back to bite me in the butt for (c)). My feet, not to mention my ankles, are actually pretty damn scrawny. This means that, in order for my foot to actually remain secured in the shoe, my foot itself, not just my ankle, must be tethered down, making the last two options (around-arch cross-strap and double cross-strap) the only viable ones for me. (Ironically, the T-strap style, designed to better hold the foot in the shoe, is actually far worse for my scrawny feet than the traditional strap alone: the T-strap part, connecting the ankle strap to the front of the shoe means that you can only tighten the ankle strap so much before you start contorting the shoe in bizarre ways... i.e., I can't tighten them nearly enough to actually secure my ankle, let alone the rest of my foot.)
But (a) and (b) pale in comparison to (c), which ends up conferring the most impossibility to the task of finding a shoe that fits me. As a rule, larger shoe sizes mean bigger shoes -- not just longer, but also wider and deeper (or "taller", as the case may be). As I said, my feet are scrawny, but they are also flat, in more ways than one. The front couple inches of my feet consist pretty much solely of my stupid, long toes, which, also being scrawny, are not particularly tall... and so my toes slide right through the vast majority of open-toe shoes and onto the floor. This is obviously bad. The fitters at every shoe store I've been to therefore tell me that I need narrow (or extra-narrow) width shoes, so I won't slide through. But my feet are in fact not only average width, but my arches collapse (as opposed to having rigid flat feet), so when I'm standing, my feet are even wider still around the (non-)arch. So narrow-width shoes are too narrow behind the ball of my foot and cut into my feet, yet they're often still too loose around the toe to fit like a glove, as dance shoes ought to. Really, what I need is a shoe that's normal width, but has less of the top material, making for a "flatter" shoe. Unfortunately, they do not make shoes in varying flatnesses. :\
Despite all this, at the second dance shoe store I visited in my search, I found these:
And they were exactly what I was looking for, and best of all (and more importantly), by some strange miracle, they *fit perfectly*. And I didn't even have too much trouble dancing in the 2.8-inch heel, though it would've taken some getting used to to become really comfortable with it.
But it was not to be... after dancing in them a couple of times, once or twice for one hour, and then once for two or three, I couldn't feel my toes. At all. Except for this weird tingly sensation when I wiggled them just right. At first I kind of thought it was the cold (it was freezing out around this time), but no. A weekend went by, and still no feeling had returned. Then a week, then two. And then I just accepted that I no longer had feeling in my toes. I think it was a full two months later that I eventually realized I could feel my toes again.
Now, I liked these shoes so much that I was tempted to just wear them anyway and give up feeling my toes forever. But it was somewhere around this time that my teacher was starting to put more emphasis on proper technique... and apparently my feet are configured such that when I put my weight on the inside of the ball of my foot (as one must in Latin ballroom) while wearing heels over 2 inches, some bone in the ball of my foot is perfectly positioned to crush the hell out of some adjacent nerve, which... hurts. A lot.
So my search for dance shoes continued...
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