extra-curricular

[fahye]

Because I sometimes forget that people don't know these things: I'm taking swing dance lessons, once a week, and plan on going to the fortnightly social dances when I can spare the time. Tonight we had a guest teacher from Texas, and she covered a lot of really useful stuff about matching the lead's stance and rhythm, and points of connection between lead and follow. The follows spent half of the first lesson with their eyes closed, which was...fascinating, and made picking up on the bodily cues much easier than I expected.

I've also agreed to train as a figure skating judge this year - I skated long enough and have choreographed enough for others that I know what's good and what isn't, and the Canberra rink desperately needs judges. That's only one night a month. And my mother is the competition convenor for the state this year, so I'll be putting in hours helping with admin and scoring at local comps.

It feels good to have more than just uni. I'll have choir, swing, judging and tutoring. I am considering weekly French classes as well, but that might be pushing it, and my skills are so all over the place that I doubt I'd slot nicely into any particular level.

Not quite a non sequitur: I really, really miss dancing. Swing is good fun, but it's a completely different thing to jazz and ballet and street funk. I miss being taught a dance to a piece of music and doing it, performing it, I miss the complete control I used to have over my body. I've been tapdancing in the kitchen more often, dancing to unconventional songs and moving from a rib isolation to a tendu in the middle of a step.

I don't have the time for more classes, but it was a part of me for ten years and I keep turning around and finding myself aching for it.

...

Well. That was different.

Comments

[liminalliz.livejournal.com]

Swing dancing, mmm. What style of swing?

[silveraspen]

For a long time, I thought I "didn't have time" for too much that was outside school and work.

Eventually I realized I was wrong about that and joined my church choir. This has turned out to be one of the best things ever that I could have done for myself, and I bet you'll find that you'll have a similar experience. Go you!

[skygiants]

Oh, man, swing dance is awesome - and the 'eyes closed' really helps; although it's terrifying at first, it eventually becomes this sort of weightless feeling that's fascinating.

I miss my social dance classes.

[genarti]

...And now I miss dancing.

*grins*

And I miss the kind of dancing I never really did -- the kind that gives you that sort of control over your body. I have done tiny little dabbles in ballet and ballroom and jazz such, and loved them; one of the many reasons I want to find a job with better pay than the temping one I have now is because I want to be able to stop pinching pennies and instead look into all the many dance classes around Boston and see what I can get into. (And start going to Scottish dance again, which is the one that I grew up doing.) It's just such an exhilerating rush, to move and to flow and to get it right with the music.

Martial arts, too, are something I enjoy for many similar reasons, and really want to get back into.

[dramawench.livejournal.com]

I know exactly how you feel. I gave up dance when I was 14, after I had been taking lessons for 12 years. I ended up taking irish dance and modern in college and I didn't realize how much I had missed it til i started again.