Shy Dancer.

I have this weird tendency of getting really nervous when I dance with someone for the first time. I get even more nervy if I dance with someone I know is a good dancer. When I get nervous I cannot relax and follow the lead, and the dance ends up near to a disaster from my side. So basically the better I know my partner is, the worse I dance. Shouldn't it be quite the opposite: the better my partner knows how to lead, the better I should be able to dance with him from the start? Okay, there are few good leaders who I feel comfortable dancing with starting from the first dance, but I cannot really know why. I wonder what the reason could be.

Today I had my first Zouk practice with JV, and I must admit I was quite nervous about it, even though JV is one of the exceptions from my main rule. Maybe it was because I really wanted to dance with him and was worried of doing something so wrong he would regret ever asking me to practice with him. Writing this down now sounds pretty foolish, doesn't it! Not surprisingly, I couldn't relax enough in the beginning, but after an hour or so I was finally able to get over from my nervousness, and I feel it really reflected to my dancing. I was even able to forget my surroundings during dancing, which was good because there were lots of people going around and organizing some kind of party for the evening.

JV taught me some basic elements of Zouk that don't appear in most of other dances, and so are maybe the most difficult to adapt intuitively. We started with head movement around and from one side to the other, and the signals to make the girl move her head. It is quite hard to make the movement relaxed and slow enough, and I felt like loosing my balance quite easy while moving my head around. Next teaching was moving the whole upper body all way down to horizontal level. I know it is going to get more natural for me, but at the moment I just feel somehow uncomfortable doing these kind of movements. I just feel ridiculous stooping my back and staying there for quite a long time. Well, it was a great choice from JV to teach me these kind of things. All I need now is just lots and lots of dancing to get used to them. Anyway, thank you JV for the great advice and pleasant dancing moments, I'm already looking forward our next session!

What happened in HOT-dancing this week was, firstly, that I realized Foxtrot is not my dance. Seriously, I almost left the dance class on Wednesday. I don't know why I find it so hard taking long steps backwards, and when I make my steps too short, I get walked over. Foxtrot is not even that fun dance to dance it would motivate me to start putting a lot of effort on learning the steps right. It is not that I am going to reject the whole dance, but I am just saying there are so many other dances that I'd rather do.

One of those dances is my favorite standard dance, Slow Waltz, that we luckily practiced on both Thursday's dance classes. In the intermediate class the emphasis was more in the technique while the advanced class concentrated on figures. Even though Nic taught me lots of technique I learned lots of new things about the basic steps and how to make the "waves" right. The thing most of us were doing wrong in the beginning was going down on the first beat even though you should already start going down the waive on the third beat. Waltz is actually really hard dance although many people think is the dance everyone can dance.

I must say that even though technique training is really important and I like doing it, I enjoyed the figure class more. Our teachers taught us American Slow Waltz which is really figure-focused and space demanding dance. Still the dance has the same glory as the competition Slow Waltz, and I love imagining myself in a big old ballroom wearing beautiful evening dress, trying to do all the movements as exquisite as I can. Lovely! Thursday's Slow Waltz class ended up in a way I wouldn't have ever expected: my teacher gave me shoulder and feet massage! What a good run for my money this dance class has proven to be!

It has definitely been a great dancing week! I have also been thinking a lot about my relationship to dancing, and I've also discovered some new aspects of myself. I've realized I don't quite know what I really want from dancing at the moment, I just want to keep on doing it. Tomorrow I'm going to the Zouk in Finland 1st Birthday Party, and my goal for the night is to dance with many different people to get over my fear of dancing with new partners. I'll report later how I managed it!