My Dance Story

Photo by Berg Chabot.

Hello you there! I'm Riikka, a Finnish partner dancer based in Helsinki, and this blog is devoted to my number one passion, dancing. Nice to have you here with me! Here are couple of words of how I started dancing and what I have been doing since then. If you're interested to hear more about something specific, you can naturally browse my post archive, since I have been writing ever since I started dancing, or contact me directly.

I started dancing in the beginning of 2011 when my good friend Nic moved to Finland and decided to start teaching me ballroom dancing. He used to be a competition dancer and introduced me to the ten standard and Latin competition dances. I had no experience of dancing or partner dancing for that matter, but I got instantly addicted to the world of dance. I was so excited about this new passion of mine that I started to write down my thoughts to this blog. My idea was to write kind of a dance diary about our practices and what I had learned, but most importantly how dancing made me feel and how it influenced my life.

After amazing five months, however, our paths diverged and I was left alone with a huge desire to keep on dancing. After the summer it didn't take too long before I found myself in Finnish ballroom classes and applied to be a dancer in my student organization's yearly performance Spex. My fall ended up being so full of dancing that there wasn't much space for anything else. During this intensive dance period I was happy to get three regular practice partners, JV, Mr A and Michaelo, and besides ballroom dances started to dance Zouk, Bachata and Kizomba. I was blindly in love with dancing.

Photo by Berg Chabot.

Maybe due to such an intensive dance period I experienced a kind of dance burnout and kept a break of couple of months in the beginning of the next year. After a recovery, I started to dance increasingly more Zouk taking regular classes from Freddy & Andressa and traveling to some Zouk congresses in Europe, but also kept on going to the ballroom classes. My concentration in dancing was mostly on getting the hang out of the right dance technique and to improve my movements and following. Even though there was still very much dancing in my life, I tried to find a more balanced way to include dancing into it. This blog wasn't anymore a diary of dance practices, but became more like a way to go through my thoughts, feelings and experiences of dancing.



Photo by Bob McGahan.

After the following summer I had to reduce taking dance classes because I had to concentrate more to my studies and work. I however started taking Voguing classes since I had a feeling I should do some solo dancing too. Rather than concentrating on the dance technique I let myself enjoy the amazing feelings dancing made me feel.

On February 2013 I moved to Brisbane where I spent six months doing a student exchange and, of course, dancing. Brisbane has an amazing Latin dancing scene and I got used having big regular dancing parties many times a week. Needless to say that I did a lot of social dancing. I also started taking West Coast Swing classes there couple times a week. The time in Brisbane made my love affair to dancing even more intensive and enjoyable.

After coming back home from Brissy, I got back to regular Zouk classes with Freddy & Andressa in the beginning of 2014 and decided to concentrate my energy mostly to Zouk. At this point also yoga had came into my life, firstly to support my dancing but, as I later was to realize, to kick off a big change in me. My year 2014 was thus mostly about finding myself through Zouk and yoga, though I kept WCS on the side to withdraw some inspiration from. I also gained some experience as a dance teacher and slowly started to let myself go towards that direction.



Photo by Alex Jackson.

In the beginning of 2015 I wanted to find some more challenge and started partner acrobatics and jazz dancing to improve my body control in partner dancing. Let's see what kind of challenges there are to come!

So, you are very welcomed to follow my dance story and all those wonderful feelings dancing brings within me.