Going Solo?

First of all, I appreciate that so many have messaged me to express their conserns and shared their tips for knee problems. Actually, my knee got lot better during the weekend, and on Monday I already thought that I just got scared for noting. However, it seems that I am doing something wrong in West Coast, because on Tuesday's class my knee went back to super painful only after 20-something minutes of social dancing. Seriously, on Saturday I was dancing Zouk for two hours in a row and the knee was fine! And nothing on Popping or Hiphop classes! It is like my body was telling me it doesn't want me to turn into a West Coast dancer. What worries me now is the Swingsation that is happening already next week. How can I handle a whole weekend if I barely can manage one night?

Anyway, enough with complaining about my knee. As you might have noticed, one new thing I have started doing here is street dancing. I do Popping on Monday evenings in Mad Dance House and Hiphop on Wednesdays in Mega Jam, and I have totally fallen into both of those. The Popping classes offer lots of challenging technique and make me feel like wanting to learn more and more. In the Hiphop, then again, we do a different routine each time, and even though I have had quite negative attitude for those kind of classes, doing a choreo is actually fun way to learn new moves and get inspiring ideas. Its also great memory and speed test (and a good work-out)!

Doing solo dancing is so different to partner dancing. I haven't really been doing solo dancing, but now I have a feeling that solo would be the next step for me to take. Many times I've had a feeling that I can't dance alone, that I need someone to lead me, and this is something I'd like to get rid of. I want to be able to shine in the dance floor without someone telling me what to do. So, I have been thinking that I might just concentrate on solo dancing when I get back to Finland. I am quite happy with the level of my following skills and believe solo dancing would give me the technique I need to put also my partner dancing to the next level.

I have been mostly doing only partner dancing during all of my dance career. Partner dancing is always a conversation with two people, and it includes adapting your dancing with the partner. Before dancing, however, I enjoyed doing sports alone. Going to gym, aerobics class, yoga or what ever I desired to do was truly my own time, time to concentrate only to myself. Lately I have been having this huge urge to start working out again and taking that time to concentrate to my body only. Going to solo dancing, I realized, is one way of satisfying that urge, and it comes with other advantages too: it gives me something new to think about dancing and, in the best case, makes me a more diverse dancer! Even though I absolutely love hard workouts and putting my body to its limits, I feel like it doesn't give me much more than a stronger body when it comes to abilities to utilize outside the gym. I think its so much more exciting and impressing to be able to do cool dancing moves than to have a great technique to lift weights, don't you agree? Sure, hard workouts give that heavenly after workout feeling and possibly a nice looking lean body, but that is achievable through dancing too.

That said, a strong dancer needs strong muscles to have good body control and better ability to perform variety of movements. Because I don't have a gym membership here, I've started to do some home workouts especially to strengthen my core muscles, but somehow I find it hard to motivate myself into doing those. Morning home workouts are not just my thing. So, when I get back home, I'll definitely either find a good and affordable gym to go once or twice a week, or find out other ways to take better care if my muscles (I'm thinking of starting yoga, some acrobatics, or maybe pole dancing...?). It has been too long since I've had that wonderful muscle ache telling me that I have been doing something challenging with my body. However, dancing will always be first in my priority list, and if I had to choose between gym and dance class, I'd no doubt go with the latter. Strong muscles are there to support and enable dancing, not my ultimate goal as such.

After all that, would I have much time left for partner dancing then? Hm, not really. Sometimes a change of direction is good though, and in my situation, maybe inevitable.

As a final treat, here is a link to some of my social dancing in Rio Rhythmics the other day. I tried to post the video straight to here, but apparently Blogger had something against it. Anyway, you can view the (amazingly high quality!) video through this link. Also, some pictures from dancing and having fun on top of beautiful scenery in Moreton Island a while ago:

Photos by Julien Fantin.