On Thursday's intermediate HOT-dance class I got to know once again a new dance: Humppa. Apparently Humppa is not one of the most popular Finnish ballroom dances since there were only around ten people in the class compared to the normal 20-30 dancers' group. Humppa is a fast Finnish music style and the dance reminded me of Samba. The basic step has a lots of bounce as Samba does, but the rhythm is different, 4/4 beat, and the hip movement is missing. I was a bit afraid of going to the intermediate class with no experience of Humppa, but it turned out that also the others had difficulties with the basics, so we spend most of the time practicing the basic step and simple figures. Humppa is really energy consuming dance so all of us were quite exhausted after jumping around for two hours. I felt sorry for the leaders because they didn't have any breaks between dance partners; at least us followers could rest while waiting the next dance.
After "warming up" with Humppa, many of us continued to an advanced class of Cuban Salsa, which attracted lots of dancers who normally don't come there. Also for me this was a dance class I didn't want to miss! Even though the class level was advanced, we started from the very beginning. For me this was perfect because Cuban Salsa differs from the Salsa style I'm used to even with the basic steps. The hardest thing for me was to keep my knees bent all the time and to restrict my hip movement only to side to side movement (not to do the 8-shaped movement that I tend to do automatically). We also practiced some really basic Cuban Salsa figures, such as pausa, dile que no and dile que si. We'll have Cuban Salsa also for the next two times so we'll have time for some more advanced figures in the coming weeks.
On Friday I had my first actual Spex practice. As I told before, I'm going to dance in five dances in our student musical Spex. Since I cannot reveal the songs, I'm going to call the dances with numbers 1-5 in the order they appear in the show. So Friday's practice was for a dance 1, and this dance's song is definitely one of my favorite ones in the Spex. The
choreographer for the dance 1 is one of the Spex dancer's sisters' boyfriend (someone correct me if I got this wrong!) and he is a dance teacher in Footlight dance school. In addition to his great skills in dancing and teaching we were able to use the dance school's space, which is a perfect place to practice! From the first glimpse, the choreography seems really awesome. It has lots of small tricks that look great but are not too hard to learn. I think most of the girls (including me) dancing in this dance don't have much experience in this dance style so the choreography couldn't even be too challenging or we wouldn't learn it well within the limited time we have. Because this dance style is totally new for me, even the simple and basic things takes a lot of time to learn, and most of the time I was the slowest one to get the steps. This leads to one thing that I really liked about our choreographer: he looked at me many times with a patient and kind look as saying "yes, be both know that you are doing many moves wrong but don't worry, you'll get them with time!". I could see after the practice that I wasn't the only one who got really excited about this dance and the choreography. I'm telling you: it's going to be spectacular!
In Friday we had also a small Spex dancers' evening party at one of the dancer's cozy apartment. Everybody brought something small to eat which ended up a table full of different kind yummy treats. We ate well, took some drinks and got to know each others. We, for example, played this game "who of us would most probably..." which revealed some interesting things about the other dancers. I must say the evening was a success and everybody had lots and lots of fun. I can't remember when was the last time I laughed that much (no wonder my abbs hurt when I woke up this morning)! Around midnight we headed to a near bar called Korjaamo from where we later continued to Roska for some party dancing. Around 2:30 am I was already heading to the main bus station with two other dancers to get a bus home, but we ended up to this new night club on our way and danced until the place closed! Today it wasn't a hard decision to skip the dance class I was planning on going and to sleep late. Thank you all Spexers for the unforgettable night!
By the way, today I finally bought myself new dancing shoes! I love my high-heels but they just don't go with every dance and I have been needing flat shoes for a long time. I went to Suomen Tanssitarvike and after trying on different kind of shoes I settled on black leather sneaker-like dancing shoes. They just felt the right pair for me the moment I put them on. I can't wait to wear them in tomorrow's practice and see if they were worth of the buy!
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