Hyperreal

I’ve had a busy weekend… First up was a workshop in Dundee with Nigel & Nina, on Blues dancing.

The workshop was relatively early for me coming from Glasgow, meaning I had to leave home fairly early, and so the late night I had the previous evening might not have been a good idea in retrospect…

But I got up, and out and caught my train in good time, got to Dundee, and caught a taxi to the venue for today’s activities. Just as well I sort-of knew where I was going as the taxi driver didn’t.

There were more folks than I had expected – not that it was overcrowded – with lots of people I knew or recognised at least. That was nice.

After a quick warm, dancing with rotating partners for parts of a song, we went straight into the workshop. It’s interesting that the moving on of partners continued through-out the workshop with no account of fixed partners. I’m glad about this as as well as getting to work with everybody (or at least all the girls) it meant that the organisational hassle of some fixed, some not was avoided.

We started with the blues position and a few simple “moves” – really just different times weight-changes. They were OK, though bending my knees enough was difficult. Harder, and requiring more knee-bending were the slides we then did.

Actually the slides were OK, but leading them wasn’t.

Even worse was the wee bit of freestyle practice that followed. I was really lacking in confidence, and couldn’t concentrate on the moves and the music at the same time. It didn’t go well. Although I could hear when slides would work it was always too late…

Felt quite bad.

But then we did a wee fixed sequence of moves for practice, with a few more moves and that was better, because even if there were bits I couldn’t do so well, at least my partner knew what I had intended and so I could concentrate on other things apart from the one or two problem moves…

Then we had a break which lead into a mini lecture about blues music and blues dancing. Basically the majority of music we listen to these days is derived from the same rhythms created with blues music over a hundred years ago, and so in some ways almost anything can be blues. When it comes to dancing it’s hard to pick out exacty what makes a track suitable for blues – it’s not tempo, character, or style – at least there is blues dance music across all these parameters. So it comes down to blues music is blues music. (I’d maybe say that there’s a thing about the attitude, or that the beat is lazy, or something like that. For us to agree what makes blues, it must be possible to pick out what makes blues music different.)

Afte the lecture it was back to the class, with a bit on musicality and breaks. There was really nothing new for me in this bit, beyond a by-the-way that they threw in at the end. It was a tip to say to the women that they should do double-spins when it was necessary to fill the bar so that the guy could lead the next move “on the 1″. Doing one spin when two were needed would leave the guy trying to fill the bar on his own… Worse would be doing two when only one was needed. As I don’t spin much a great deal, and when I do it’s me that’s in charge of the overall timing, I’ve never thought about this…

It lead me to think though more about the elegance of finishing moves at the end of the bar to start a new one on the 1… And how I must put in extra turns and spins to help achieve that without actually realising what I’m doing. Definitely the most interesting thing I thought about all day – and all from an after-thought…

I can’t quite remember what we were doing after this point, but we moved on to doing a longer, more complex routine to some set music.

This was a rather nice set of moves which worked really well with the music. It included a cool one-handed drop that I was a little wary of, but like the other drops I’ve learnt recently, it worked well with all the women who wanted to do it (there was a safer lean/dip thing if you preferred it, though most people I think found the drop nicer to do.)

Again, this wee routine helped my confidence, allowing me to rehearse moves without worrying whether they fitted the music.

The entry into the drop was quite tricky, involving the girl both ducking her head under your right arm, but then hooking her right arm over above the same right arm of yours. Often the girl would miss. Two times rather than sweeping her arm over my partner managed to punch me in the face.

After we’d done that routine we had another wee freestyle session, just to practice the stuff we’d done during the whole workshop. I abandoned the slides and concentrated on the stuff I could do, and remarkably found much of my musicality coming back to me.

I guess the pressure to lead moves I wasn’t at all confident in messed it up too much.

So we finished the workshop with me feeling much more confident than I would have imagined half-way though, and I’m rather pleased about that.

That’s not to say I’m now an expert blues dancer, but I’m generally feeling better about the whole thing…

And that was the workshop.

The weekend continued with a party later that night…