Dance Boot Camp

After Tuesday at the Atomic, I was really looking forward to getting in more lesson time. I stopped by the Atomic Ballroom and paid for their month-long lesson and dance pack. As I mentioned previously, I really like the fact that I can take up to three classes in a row on the same trip to Irvine. My goal for the month is to jump from the "Absolute Beginner" group to the "Level 1" group (I didn't make up the names, but it seems to roughly correlate to beginner and intermediate). There seems to be a fairly steep jump in skill level, but we'll see how I progress.

What's that? I was there just in time to take an Absolute Beginner Salsa class? Why not?! It was almost as if I planned that. I had lots of fun learning a new basic pattern (though my mind might be getting a bit cluttered), and just to get some more "floor time" in.

Dance "frame" seems to be fairly important in Salsa in order to communicate from lead to follow, and my partners seemed to have problems keeping a good frame. I tried to communicate that to them subtly by doing slight push-pulls with my hands in open position to emphasize their loose frame, but had to resort to asking them to help me out by being firmer. I'm not quite sure what the etiquette is to do that when one's in a lesson, so I tried to frame it as a "I'm having this problem, and you can help me by doing this thing," statement. This was a bigger problem when trying to learn the spin. I wasn't quite getting the timing of the turn, or the hand-work. This video covers my 45 minute class in 7 minutes, with a slightly different emphasis on the hand positioning for the turn (we didn't learn the "J" motion, just raised our hands).



As I watch it again, I recognize that my instructor last night (Jerry) talked about using the raised hand to help the follows start their turn, which the instructor in the video didn't mention. I'd really like to work some more on that turn.

Salsa's closed position isn't something I'm used to, so I'm sure I had problems there. Again, we needed to communicate our position with strong open hand and strong elbow and forearm connection, but the follows didn't seem to pick up on that and our communication suffered. As much my fault as theirs, I'm sure (he said, insincerely).

The class ended at 7pm, which gave me just enough time to get over to Heritage Park for the OCSwing lesson at 7:30. It's nice to have a class which is definitely progressive as opposed to the Atomic one's which are mostly drop-in classes. We did a review of the six-count basic, the tuck-turn, switch, circling, and then learned the Charleston basic. This was mostly review for me after the Tuesday Atomic Ballroom class, but the Charleston footwork is a bit trickier than the other stuff we've been doing and I was far from perfect. We then tried a variant of the Charleston where we did six kicks then returned to the basic pattern. Then we worked on transitioning from the six-count pattern we learned last week to the Charleston pattern. And then we worked on transitioning from the end of the Charleston pattern back to the six-count pattern. Very nice.

After class, one of the guys, Phil pointed out that we could really do that repeating pattern of six-count to Charleston all night long and be ok. Good call, Phil. Would be nice to learn some other basic turns, but I'm sure the instructors have their own ideas about what we should learn and in what order. Phil and I made plans to meet up at the Atomic again on Friday. Tried to sell Theresa (?), Maryann, and John on the idea as well. I'm planning on taking the three lessons from 6:15 to 8:30, and Phil plans to be there around 7. Oops, am I supposed to be riding Saturday morning? Well, I might not be staying up to 2am, but it should be fun.

So, the count for the month of March:
OCSwing: 1 lesson 1 hour
Atomic Ballroom: 1 lesson .75 hour

Running Total:
2 hours with SL
2 hours with OCSwing
2.25 hours with Atomic Ballroom (.75 of which is Salsa)