Redefining Myself.

Last weekend I travelled to my first foreign WCS event to Neverland Swing 2015 held in a small Dutch city called Veenendaal about an hour train trip from Amsterdam. I won a full pass to the event from a J’n’J competition in the Swinging Xmas Party Weekend last December and thus had a good excuse to travel again to Holland for dancing. Another good excuse was to meet up with my best friend and to spend some quality time together in the beautiful city of Amsterdam.

The event was pretty small scale, having only one workshop day, two parties and roughly 50 attendees, but it had a nice cozy feeling in it and actually this kind of friendly atmosphere is the reason I prefer smaller events to huge ones. The level of the dancers was also closer to my own and maybe this is why I felt more comfortable on the dance floor – sometimes being in a lower level compared to most of the dancers makes me feel I should be somehow better than what I am (a bad habit I should definitely get rid of). The workshops were thought through nicely, each class supporting the next one forming a good continuum, and concentration on the dance technique was something that supported my own learning the best possible way.

It is very useful to define some kind of goal for a dance weekend, even if it was just to enjoy the social dancing to the max. This time I decided that I was going to put my concentration during the whole weekend to my basic technique – I was not going to practice stepping variations, hijacking or things like that. There are some specific things that irritate me in my basic WCS dancing, such as my anchoring and stiffness of my arms, and those are the ones I’m trying to fix during this dance semester. Thus, I was mostly 'just' following and not even trying to mix things up so that I could learn first to follow well before adding in some spices. Because of this decision, at some points I felt like I was being a boring (or uninspiring) follower because I didn't do much variations or suggest anything.

However, being a 'boring follower' didn’t prevent me from winning the level 2 J’nJ competition (thank you my lovely German dance partner for the dances in the finals!!). To be honest, I was quite surprised about the judges decision because I didn't feel that I was contributing our dancing with anything special. Maybe the judges were paying more attention to the team work this time? Anyway, it felt nice to have this kind of encouragement to keep on working with my basic technique and following; apparently I'm heading to the right direction. As a prize I got to be part of the teacher’s show (someone must have the video of me dancing there - I need to find it!) and further I won yet another full pass to the next foreign WCS event: West Coast Swing Insomnia in Slovenia on 1-4 October 2015. So apparently I need to continue travelling for WCS (not that I would mind!). Who's in?

Why I wanted to write this post was actually to write down some feelings I went through during the event. I think that for the first time I felt that I was being part of the crowd, that I could identify myself as a WCS dancer. That was a nice feeling. I've always liked everything WCS has to offer as a dance style but felt a little bit like an oddball within WCS dancers. Maybe I have been identifying myself so strongly as a Zouk dancer that it has put my confidence in WCS down. Or maybe identifying myself as a Zouk dancer has been my excuse of sticking in the beginner level in WCS. Whatever the case it might be, I find it quite interesting that I notice this only now after dancing WCS for quite a long time!

So, from now on I would rather like to identify myself simply as a dancer, not some-specific-style-of-a-dancer because identifying myself as a Zouk dancer has obviously already restricted my improvement as a dancer (even though it might have contributed to my improvement as a Zouk dancer). Same goes with identifying myself as a partner dancer, something that I have been definitely doing – I don't want the identification as a partner dancer to restrict my improvement as a solo dancer because in the end it will restrict also my improvement as a partner dancer. You define yourself. As simple as that.


So, here we go:

I am a dancer.

...

Hmm, I like the sound of that.