When Friends Become Enemies.

Fellow girls, you must know the feeling in a dance party when there are simply too many ladies waiting for their turn to dance with the few guys. You wish most of those bit**s would just go home leaving you more chances to have fun in the dance floor, right? It is cruel but true that the party is simply better when there is a shortage of good followers, making you feel like the most desired dance partner of the night.

There is one thing though: these bit**s are also your friends. Who would like their friends to get out of the great party?

The problem with a small dance scene is that there usually is just a handful of good leaders, but the amount of good followers is a double of that, at least. There can be many reasons behind this phenomenon, like that it is more challenging to be a good leader or that men generally don't start dancing as much as women do, but the problem remains. This is exactly what the Finnish Zouk scene is going through now. It is excellent that we have increasingly more great followers, but unfortunately the ratio between leaders and followers is getting more and more unbalanced. I like watching others having fun in the dance floor, but in the end I go to dance parties to dance, not to watch.

You could imagine that a surplus of ladies would draw more guys into the scene, but oddly that doesn't seem to be the case. Even if it successfully worked this way, no leader can become a great Zouk leader in a short period of time. Beginner guys don't take me wrong: it is fun to dance with you, but sometimes a lady just needs couple of awesome dances, a leader who makes her feel like the best dancer in the world. Zouk is not the easiest partner dance and naturally it takes time not just to understand the rules but to make those rules work in the dance floor.

It is exactly as my girl friend said the other day: "I'm sorry to say but I was glad you and the other good followers weren't in last weekend's party. It meant lots of good dancing for me." Yeah, I know. It's sad, because I would love to see all my friends in dance parties. It is just frustrating if there is some kind of fight of who gets to dance next. It does no good between the ladies plus in the worst case it exhausts the guys and leaves them with no freedom of choice. Dead end.

In a broader sense, one of the weaknesses, if you could say so, of partner dancing is that you need a good dance scene to enjoy it. There is no use of learning a dance that you cannot do in practice. I'm not the only one who must be thinking that why am I spending all my money and time to learn this dance so few dances in Finland? Does it make any sense that I have to travel somewhere else to use the skills I've learned?

In any case, what cannot happen is friends fighting with each other. A great dance scene needs great followers and a great dance party needs lots of good, beautiful and talented ladies. While waiting the guys to catch us up, we ladies just have to make sure we remain friends and not turn into enemies.

By the way, if you want to see another Zouk demonstration by me and Freddy from Oslo, you can find it in here: http://youtu.be/MXQ0x8KiAbU. You can maybe see that I'm more relaxed in this one and therefore it worked out better than the first one.