Hyperreal

JJ’s tonight… At least until 9.30. Then we were kicked off the dance-floor to allow “Battle of the Bands” to start.

Seems like this is going to happen every week until the end of September too.

I’m not happy about losing an hour (and as we’ve been going up to 11pm recently, it’s really an hour and a half) of dancing. OK, so a bunch of us went downstairs to the pub and had a dance there, but it’s not the same.

We had a couple of visitors too – one from down south, the other from Edinburgh. I’m sure that won’t have made a good impression.

Anyway, it was good to see them, and I did manage to get a dance with both… Shame though that I didn’t manage to get dances with so many other folks I’d have liked to.

But I’ll stop going on about it!

Spent a fair amount of the time (in particular during class) practicing with my partner. Later then we got our respected teacher to watch us dance and give us some feedback. We’ve got a few things to work on…

• Smile. This is an interesting point. The last couple of weeks (including twice tonight) a few girls have danced with have said I have started to smile much more during dancing. This includes with my partner. Perhaps because we were being watched – judged in fact – and thus under pressure it affected me or us. I know that if either dancer in a couple doesn’t smile much it’s hard for the other one to.

• Pausing. It was fast music we were dancing to, and although I did vary the pace to some extent, at times we were rushing on. This could either be me not leading (or being clear enough in my leading) of more pauses between moves, or my partner anticipating and so not giving me a chance to stop her.

  I think there’s a bit of both. I also think we need to work on making sure I’m not unbalancing my partner, as sometimes the unlead movement was in order to restore balance rather than anticipation per se.

• Poses. When we are in these pauses, whether they are in a totally open position or mid-move, we should be in a good pose, not like statues, but still acknowledging the music in our arm or head movements, trying to make it sexy.

• Confidence. Much of the problems listed above could be down to a lack of confidence – under competition conditions I need to find the same confidence that I have on the social dance-floor.

It wasn’t all bad though. We were told we’ve got all the moves, the musicality and the connection (except that smiling thing) to do well.

I’m pretty happy with what I thought was a fair review. Hopefully we’ll get to work on these things soon and get them sorted.

Cheers!