Hyperreal

Because I’m a bit behind with my blog at the moment, I got a guest author to write my blog for me for my visit to JJ’s on Tuesday…

My corrections and clarifications are in italics

I arrived to Jaks towards the end of the beginners class in my usual hot-shot like manner. I noticed it was exceptionally busy on the dance floor, and that other hot shots who wouldn’t normally turn up till later in the evening had already arrived to help with the numbers of excess women. Which of course is not a thing I complain about (the excess women rather than the helping)

I actually arrived while the first move of the class was being taught, but I needed to get some caffeine in me to give me some energy before I could do anything.

I’ll talk more about the freestyles in a minute, but lets look first at the moves for the intermediate class…

Unfortunately I blacked out for the intermediate class so I can’t remember any of the moves. I did notice a lot of what was going on in the beginners revision class. There were nearly 50 people there - 30 women and 20 men (some of which were again helpers from the intermediate class to help balance out the numbers). I don’t know why it was so busy - maybe because of the GU closing down some people were gradually making there way over to Jaks. Whatever the reason, its making it extremely crowded in the classes.

The intermediate class was billed as fairly simple, but I didn’t find it so… Moves were…

• Arm-jive swizzle into walk around into basket. Found it very difficult to lead the less experienced women in the walk around part of this move.
• Tea-pot into LH comb, push spin. Found it difficult to go into the comb from the tea-pot position. Wasn’t set up for push-spin and never managed to spin myself when the two moves were combined.
• If there was another move, I forget it – but those two listed moves, were really two lots of two.

Not my most successful intermediate class.

So on to the freestyle. Because of the huge numbers there (I was told by a passing taxi that the headcount that night was at 130 people), I found it difficult to spot out new dancers to dance with, so largely stuck to my favourite dancers (including a visiting DJ :awe: ).

Not entirely true – I danced with quite a few people I don’t dance with very often, though I did also dance a lot with my favourites too. (Was good to see a few folks I hadn’t seen for a while…) I think I tend not to ask too many beginners so as not to scare them off with my unconventional style.

As this was the first regular night following my “flicks and pops” workshop, I tried to incorporate these into my dancing. I’m not sure if it really fits in with my style and I prefer a much smoooother way of dancing but it does give me some potential ideas for ‘funkier’ tracks.

At one point one of my regular partners attempted to do role reversal with me. While I can’t say it was entirely successful (she seemed to be wrestling with me to get me to move in the correct way at times) she’s mocking me less for my following than my ability to do body rolls.

Yeah, and she was also cracking up at some of my attempts to do the “flicks and pops” stuff. Being led by her was fun – especially when I kept stealing the lead back from her when she wasn’t paying enough attention…

Talking of flicks and pops, and other body movement-type stuff, I also taught a girl how to do a shimmy. Here I thought all women were born with an innate ability to do this… I’ve got to say, I’m not great, but I know a good learning technique that was shown to me a while ago by a friend…

Anyway good night with lots of fun dances!

Yep… Our visiting DJ was also our visiting teacher, and despite my difficulty in doing the moves of the intermediate class, I thought she taught them well – they were just perhaps a little more difficult that she must have thought. Anyway, during the freestyle she played a couple of great songs for me (amongst all the other great stuff she played) which I really enjoyed dancing too – Flatpack’s cover of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and Jack Johnston’s “Better Together”.

As well as messing about with leading and following with a pal while we were up in the taxi-class area, we had a proper dance – well, proper-ish, in that there was bags of room so we got to mess about a lot more that we would have been able to do normally on the main floor.

And that’s all I can remember from Tuesday just now… Thanks for reading, thanks for dancing, thanks for chatting, and thanks to my guest blog author for writing.

See ya!