New Years Thoughts.

For many New Year is time to think about the past year and everything that has been happening in their lives. For me, the end of the year was more than just going trough the past year; the last couple of months have been making me think more deeply about myself, my life, my values, who I really am and what I want to become. There has been a lot of ups and downs during the past year, but those have taught me a lot and life has given me heaps of exciting adventures. For me, this New Year is also a start to a new phase in my every day life: I started a new job, which means less freedom to choose when to do what I want to do, but also new and exciting challenges.

I haven't been writing much about my dance autumn. It wasn't as exciting as my dance life in Australia, to be honest, but it had its highlights. The most obvious one is the Helsinki Zouk Festival that gave me the much needed Zouk trances I was so eagerly waiting for, not even mentioning the performance of our group choreography in front of demanding but wildly cheering audience. Weekend full of inspiration and pure enjoyment! In this stage when I have been dancing Zouk for a quite some time, I don't feel like a burst of improvement after Zouk festivals, but rather those give me a huge amount of motivation to start working on my technique and interpretation of music. I love watching the artists mastering their movements and giving the audience the chills with their presence. And what amazing artists did we have in the festival: Freddy & Andressa, Renata & Jorge, Leonardo & Becky, Bruno & Eglantine, Daniel & Leticia and Mafie Zouker. This is what I wrote right after the festival:

Dance weekends are one of the best reminders to the question why I dance. Even though there has been a lot of dancing in my autumn, I have been missing this feeling I had last weekend. A feeling that starting dancing Zouk was one of the best decision I have made in my life. A huge burst of motivation to keep on improving and developing my technique, following, styling, balance, flexibility, musicality, connection. If I ever was unsure to keep on zouking, those doubts are gone. This weekend was what I truly needed.

Another special dance event was the West Coast Swing cruise that took over 160 dancers to a big cruise ship for 23 hours. New dance connections, good atmosphere, packed lessons, good party, friends, ah! West Coast Swing has been the dance I have been trying to improve during the autumn, but to tell the truth, I'm not fully happy with my progress. Every time I feel good dancing it, I videotape myself and find out the awful truth: it feels good but it sure doesn't look good! Nevertheless, I'll keep on working on it, but maybe I'll settle for average-looking (but good-feeling) dancing.

I feel like my dance autumn was pretty quiet, but actually I did quite a lot: average three classes per week (Argentine Tango, Voguing and WCS) and a lot of choreo practices before the festival. I also did another Zouk choreo with Michaelo, but unfortunately we never ended up performing it. The autumn also included some irregular dance practices with different dance partners every now and then, and giving dance classes once a month. However, I feel like I wasn't going to any specific direction with my dancing, just going here and there without a clear course. Sure enough, much of my concentration was somewhere else than dancing. As much as I would like just to dance, I also have to graduate some day soon!

I always make three New Year promises to myself, and the most important I made this time was to think more positively of everything. This goes also for dancing: I don't want to find myself in the situation where I would put myself down because I don't improve, because I'm not as good as I wanted to be or because sometimes my body just doesn't behave the way I wanted to. This doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to improve or be better, oh no. On the contrary, I'm really excited to go back to F&A's regular classes after a huge break and finally being able to polish up the small details and mistakes. I would also love to take some other partner dance classes (my secret daydream is to learn how to dance competition rumba!), but for now it seems that it is going to be just Zouk.

One challenge with partner dancing is that I can't really do it alone. I'm super lazy going in front of the mirror alone and trying to practice styling, balance, spinning or some other dance techniques. I almost never get myself to do that. It is simply boring. So, if there are no dance parties or no practice partners available, I'm lost. During the couple of years partner dancing has become almost my only hobby and sometimes I get frustrated that it is so dependent on other dancers (sure, that's the beauty of it also). Well, slowly I have found another way than dance trancing of getting myself into this euphoric state of mind where dancing can take me: yoga. I have to admit: I'm addicted. Yoga has not only taught me a lot about my body but also about my mind, about myself. And I can do it whenever, where ever, at any time of the day (or night!), alone or in a big group. It just makes me feel so good about myself  - physically and spiritually. Try it and you'll fall in love with yourself.

To finish off, for those who didn't yet see our group choreo performance on YouTube, here it is:

P.S. There is one super exciting dance thing happening in couple of weeks, but I'll let you know later!