Two Strangers.

Since that night it was clear we needed to dance again soon. So we did.

My lucky day, Friday the 13th. My heart was beating faster than normal when I walked to pick him up. Smile. Hug. Long hug.

We didn’t care it was a Kizomba party that night; we zoukked it up. Only few dancers showed up – great, more space to dance, we both noted. First dance since then and we couldn’t hide our smiles. After that, there was no one else. Connection, laugh, play, joy. Long talks ‘till early hours. Who is this stranger with who I connect so perfectly?

Breakfast, our first practice. Amazing brunch, nap, another practice, dinner. Sleep-eat-dance kind of a day, just the way we both imagine a perfect day to be like. Like our own private dance festival weekend. Conveniently, a beautiful Valentine’s Day zouk party just happened to be on town. I couldn’t stop dancing with him in my mind even when dancing with others. Our special connection was too obvious to hide. Last dance and there was no doubt with who we both wanted to dance it with.

Slow Sunday for sharing our thoughts of dancing and dance stories. Way too much in common. Off to yet another practice that turned out the most fun and inspiring practice ever. Suddenly the stranger didn’t feel like a stranger at all.

Off to work half-sleep – it seemed we had too much to talk about. Testing our dance connection in a tango class. Wow, we just work together. One more dance party where we could go crazy. And crazy we went.

It is just amazing what dancing can bring into my life. The weekend was so much more either of us ever expected. A beautiful start for a beautiful friendship between two dance-holics. Freaking intense.

Thank you Daniel. For the dances, the perfect moments, your openness, the laughs, for making me feel that everything just makes sense in this world.

Spring Season.

I had quite a kick off to this dance year by going to two dance weekends in a row: first to III Zouk Libre festival to Warsaw followed with Snow Coast Swing event in Tampere. What an amazing time I had in both of those! Especially Warsaw's trip was somehow just perfect... Better not to even get started about it! Here are few pictures caught from me dancing in the festival (credit goes to Berg Chabot):

Also the spring season for dancing has started well and there are now no need to worry how to fill up my evenings. I must admit, though, that I was a bit greedy with my dancing and practice schedule for this season. My weekly training program now looks like this:

Monday: two hours of Argentinean Tango in Tangokoulu
Tuesday: 1,5 hour WCS class in Rock’n’Roll Dance Club Comets and two Zouk classes in Rio Zouk Style
Wednesday: partner acrobatics practice followed with 75 min jazz dance class in Helsingin Tanssiopisto
Thursday: two Zouk classes in Rio Zouk Style

In addition, I got myself a gym membership in SatsElixia where I'm going 2-3 times/week (mostly morning workouts since all my evenings are "quite" full with dancing), and I also want to keep up with my weekly yoga practices. Then, of course, there are the social dancing evenings that I cannot miss, now regularly also on Thursdays in addition to Mondays (+ Zouk practica on Sundays). Not forgetting the weekend dance events that happen every now and then like it already did twice last month…

Now when I look at this little plan I have managed to make, I cannot help but to think: will my body really like to have this much activity on regular basis? Surely, dancing classes are not really that physically demanding, but nevertheless it should be good to have proper time for resting too. I don't want to spend half of the time getting sick of not having enough time for recovering and sleeping! Maybe the gym card was a bit too much…? And what about that other life I’m supposed to have? (oh I guess I forget to mention that I also have a full-time job nowadays?)

Yes, it might look a bit intense. However, I made a conscious decision to devote as much of my free time to dancing this year as needed to push my dancing forward. You see, something pretty exciting might just be coming my way this year ;)

By the way, since now I have been writing here under a nickname but I think it's time to throw that away. So hi, my name is Riikka, and I'm a dance addict. Nice to have you here to share my passion with.

Hunting for the Perfect Dance Picture.

The few following days after a dance festival are quite exciting. Not only because you’re still living in the dance bubble you went into during the festival or that you are getting FB friend requests from the dancers you enjoyed dancing the most, but also because of the dance pictures that are slowly but surely appearing to social media. I love that many dance congress organizers nowadays bring photographers to their events to memorialize the amazing dancing moments the participants are having in the classes and parties; it is the best kind of a souvenir to bring home from a dance festival (in addition to your amazing memories of course).

When it comes to Zouk, however, a perfect shot is hard to get. There is always this fear that something really horrible will come up and hopes that this time the photographer did an amazing job with you. If you were lucky enough to get the photographer's attention from hundreds of dancers, oftentimes there is some kind of “flaw” in the otherwise perfect picture: awkward body posture, not so flattering angle, weird hand positioning, hair in the face, some strange facial expression, bad lighting or an extra person on the way. It is not only that the dancers have to dance so that it looks good but it is also a matter of split seconds for the photographer to get the right timing for the picture. Maybe this doesn’t apply to the guys as much but usually at least we girls would like to get that beautiful and sensual shot of ourselves burning the dance floor, preferably with an amazing leader who also looks great in the picture (though not stealing the whole attention from us). You know, the kind of a shot you will save as your phone’s background picture so you can stare at it before you go to sleep.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, may I present you (drum roll) my perfect dance picture taken by Robert Malecki from III Zouk Libre festival:

[Edit: Unfortunately Mr. Malecki, unlike other dance festival photographers, didn't want me to publish any of his pictures here in this blog, but you can view the picture I'm talking about through this link.]

Not only the picture itself look stunning but this is actually taken from a dance after which I knew, even if it was from the first party, that it was going to be the best dance of the whole festival. It was the kind of dance which admiring dancers would gather around to watch the magic happen and which would draw also the attention of the photographer, as luckily happened this time. It was the kind of dance after which I couldn’t stop smiling widely until my cheeks hurt. It was the kind of dance people would come to comment and compliment on later during the festival. But most importantly, it was the kind of dance that truly connected two dancers and inspiring music into a beautiful and enjoyable moment that, as luck would have it, was immortalized as the perfect picture I have been hunting for.

(And yes, I did save it as my phone background picture.)

Made to Dance Together.

I need to write about this dancer. You see, I think we were made to dance together.

When we dance, there are no limits. When we dance, there is magic around. When we dance, there is no time, no others, no have-to-be's. When we dance, we don't want to stop.

And when we finally do stop, we look into each other with amaze, not fully knowing what just happened. We just know that it was something exceptional.

I still remember the astonishment I felt after dancing with him for the first time around two and half years ago. We were both quite beginners at that time and we seriously had no idea how we were able to do all those things together. Every time I think back those dances we shared a waive of happiness runs through my body and I can't help to smile. I didn't mention him specifically when I wrote about the weekend we met but this feeling I described back then came undoubtedly from dancing with him:

"On Sunday's party I felt like I was invincible, like I could do anything, that my body didn't put any limitations to my dancing."

After our first encounter it took more than a year until we were reunited on the dance floor. First he didn't recognize me but I could see it from his face that it all came back to him as soon as we took the first dance steps together. To my surprise after all that time he still remembered exactly how I felt in his arms by wondering whether I had become taller; yes, I had started to wear heels. However, it was not until the last summer we really re-explored our magical connection – it was some late hours in Breda's congress when we couldn't stop for an hour or so. Needless to say those dances changed my evening upside down.

You can maybe imagine my heart skipping a beat last weekend when I noticed, to my very pleasant surprise, that he happened to be in the Zouk Libre festival with me. Our dance deepened little by little that weekend ending with a grande finale on Sunday night (or rather the early hours of the morning) – it was the kind of dancing I’ve never experienced before. We went into a journey of exploration, tested the limits of our bodies and our common dance style, laughed our heads off, had moments of great sensuality, reacted and counter-reacted to each other’s movements, did crazy lifts and tricks either of us had never even seen before… We continued for more than an hour until he realized his return flight was about to leave soon – I don’t know for how long we could have gone on if it wasn’t for that. The first thought we both had after that night was that we need to dance again; the exceptionality of our connection was too obvious for both of us. This time we won’t wait for another year: we will be dancing again soon, that is for sure.

Thus, if you see me smiling wider than usual during the weeks to come, I might just be thinking back that night and wondering if it really happened.

My New Year Detox.

Couple of months ago I started to read about detoxing and got excited: this is something I want to try! What would be better timing for this kind of challenge, I figured, than the beginning of the year, the promised time for healthy choices? I have never done a detox before and didn’t really want to do any juice fasting kind of diet, so I went to PUR well-being store and got myself a gentle 10 day detox package. The basic idea behind the gentle detox is that you eliminate certain food from you diet and add some ingredients that accelerate your digestion and help your internal organs to purify.

The whole point with detox is to detoxify your body from different kind of toxins that are absorbed and stored in to the body from food, cosmetics, air pollution, antibiotics etc. The body does this cleaning process naturally and thus there has been a lot of writing about detox being a big scam. Neither I believe that real and natural body cleansing comes in a pill or with a miracle diet, but I wanted to try out whether the natural process can be supported and speeded up. The point with my detox was not to lose weight or starve myself but to provide my body with nutritious and healthy food while the natural detoxifying process does the work (hopefully) more efficiently. If you’re interested on reading more about this kind of detox, one good article series about it can be found from here.

Getting ready: my New Years eve's shoppings looked a bit different this year!

During my detox I eliminated sugar, gluten, meat, dairy products, coffee, alcohol and starch-full ingredients such as potato from my diet. I also aimed to prepare my food on my own from fresh ingredients to avoid preservatives and additives (I usually eat my lunch out and thus I never know what possible things I put into my body on weekly basis). The most common question I got was that what do I eat then. Actually, I ate a lot: vegetables (a lot of those!), berries, fruit, beans, lentils, seeds, nuts, almond and oat milk, green and herbal tea, soy yogurt, fish, eggs… What I really loved about this was that I went back to my kitchen (where I haven’t spent that much time lately), filled up my fridge with green stuff and tried out new things. I also gave more thought on making my snacks healthier and brought nuts and fruit to my workplace.

My every morning started with a glass of water with juice of ½ lemon and tsp of green mix from the PUR package, followed by walk in the fresh winter weather, morning yoga or light workout in the gym. After waking up the body and the digestive system, it was time for breakfast: either raw porridge from PUR morning mix, almond/oat milk, berries, hemp protein and psyllium (super yummy!) or eggs with veggies or with banana, cardamom and cinnamon (=the best pancakes ever!). Instead of the regular morning coffee I had green tea with tsp of cold pressed coconut oil. Before lunch I had handful of nuts or a fruit. I drank lots of water or water with PUR green mix.

For lunch I had different kinds of self-made salads or soups, but I also ate out couple of times since I didn’t want to restrict my social life too much. In these cases an easy option was to go for salad bar where I could choose the appropriate ingredients. I was also happily surprised to find lunch restaurants that serve “detox-friendly” food; even though I can’t be sure what exactly was on my plate I can consider going more for those options from now on.

Cold smoked salmon with lentils, pine nuts, spinach and rocket.

Sushi lunch!

Pea, celery, avocado and almond soup - might not sound good but was excellent (and fast to prepare)!

In the afternoons I usually prepared some kind of green smoothie or, if I was on the run, had fruits, nuts or self-made protein-seed bar before dinner. I also drank herbal tea and more water. Timing of my dinner was somehow problematic thing for me since I was supposed to stop eating at 8pm while many times I came home after that, thus the idea of a 12-hour mini fast during the night wasn’t materialized as well as it could have. Dinners were quite similar to my lunches but bigger in size and I tried to put in more protein and less cabs. Before dinner I went dancing, did a light workout in gym and went to sauna, had slow yin yoga practice at home or just relaxed. I timed my detox so that I wouldn’t be too busy with too many activities and the beginning of the year was perfect since my dance classes were on a break.


Green smoothie @ work.

Wok from tofu, kale, capsicum and sugar peas.

Tomato avocado omelet.

Zucchini "pasta" with coriander pesto, kale and spinach.

Beetroot, carrot and ginger soup.

The best protein-seed-fruit bars in the world!

So after detoxing for 10 days, do I think that the whole thing is just a scam?

Well, if I listen to my body’s reactions, she is telling quite the opposite: I feel so good! I had couple of days when I felt tired or had slight headache but other than that I think I haven’t been feeling this good in my body for a long time. My quality of sleep has increased, my digestion is working better, my skin looks better… Even though my goal wasn’t to lose weight (thus I didn’t restrict my calories at all), I got rid of the looseness I got from all that Christmas feasting. However, maybe the most surprising thing was that detoxing affected my mood so positively; I have been so extremely happy the past week I can’t believe it!

Was it hard to keep up the detox diet? Not really, because I didn’t need to be hungry and got to eat lots of delicious food. Of course there were some difficulties such as abstaining from morning coffee, finding a suitable restaurant to have dinner with friends or not to have any water or other drinks with my meals (liquids dilute the digestive acids and reduce salivation), but nothing more serious than that. It was pretty easy to live my normal life while detoxing.

I’m definitely going to include some elements from my 10 day challenge to my everyday life, like starting my mornings with lemon water and some light exercise before having my breakfast. I’ll probably will cook and bake more from now on and maybe try dropping out at least sugar but also milk products and gluten from my everyday food. I won’t give away my morning coffees but in the afternoons it’s going to be green tea instead of more coffee. Most importantly: I want to listen and respect my body as much as I did during these 10 days.

All in all, I can highly recommend doing this kind of “gentle” detox and I will most probably start doing it every 6 months – at least in the beginning of every year!

New Year’s Promises.

I guess it belongs to every blogger’s responsibilities to write some kind of wrapping of the year post. However, I regard it more as a responsibility for myself to go back to what has been going on in my life during the past year. New Year is not only time for dreaming for the year to come but also time for reflecting myself: where did I start from, what kind of journey did I make and where I am now.

It feels like the year has passed by really quickly (I wonder if the time is just accelerating its speed each year you grow older…?), but my journey during it has clearly left its marks on me. I feel stronger, more self-aware and awake. I have learned to view things in more positive way and to wander the beauty and wonders of my surroundings. I have learned to love, respect and listen to myself more. I have learned to give everything of me and to let go. I have learned to see my self-centralism and my self-serving needs. I graduated from law school and started my professional career. I went through two difficult endings. I got myself a place to call home. In the end of all of this, I’m proud to say that I have grown into a better version of myself.

Still, after this tough but amazing journey I feel somehow lost. Now it is time to find my path for my next adventure.

Dance-wise my year has taught me a lot. I decided to concentrate on my primary dance style and that decision has borne its fruit. I have been obediently attending to my Zouk classes three nights per week, paying closely attention to the slightest details and minor variations. In consequence I have taken a big step forward and been given some unforgettable opportunities to show what I’ve got. Yet, there is lots of potential in me to go further and I’m eagerly looking forward next year’s challenges to come.

One year ago I wrote that I want to learn to “think more positively of everything”. In relation to dancing I especially didn’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”. I’m now happy to realize that even though I have been concentrating to improve my dance technique, I haven’t gone into this negative mind-setting where I have been many times before. Even though my dancing has been focused on learning more than having fun in dance parties, I have been able to keep the joy of dancing present in my practices. This is something I definitely want to take with me from this year.

What am I looking from the new year then? Firstly, I’m hoping to find a dance partner since this year was the first without one. I have been doing well on my own but I feel like something is missing. A dance partner is someone with who I can share my passion with, dream together, have common goals and improve with. Partner dancing is something to do with someone, with a partner, so that is something what I wish for. Secondly, I’m going to work with my balance and body control. One way of doing this is starting some sort of partner acrobatics with a dancer friend of mine. I’m also going to continue my yoga journey towards more stability demanding asanas and hand balances.

Thirdly, I’m going to concentrate more of my energy to love. Yes, you read that right, love. I want to learn to love more – of everything. I’m not talking (only) about romantic kind of love here. I want to love myself more. I want to love my friends more. I want to love my family more. I want to love more of the things I do. I want to love life more. I want to think of dancing more like spreading around universal love: partner dancing can be like giving love to your partner; taking care of him (or her), giving all of your concentration to him, enjoying the dance to the fullest with him, channeling your positive energies to him and making him feel good about your connection. Yes, I want to love more the dancers I dance with.

I want to fall in love with every single dance I dance through the year to come.

One thing is for sure: I will start my year 2015 with a proper cleaning of myself – physically and mentally – for getting the best possible kick off for my new journey. I wish you all happy New Year and new exciting adventures to come!

End of the Year Swinging.

West Coast Swing is a dance I definitely want to learn dance well at some point in my life. That point has not been this year, though, because the times I have been dancing WCS during the year can be counted with one hand fingers. However, I wanted to go back to this dance before the year was over and so I headed for two WCS events: WCS boat cruise on 29-30th November and Swinging Xmas Party Weekend on 12-14th December.

I went to a similar boat cruise one year ago and I remember having a good time there, though that time I was there with my best friend, who fortunately also dances WCS, and she might have had something to do with my good memories. This time I was brave enough to go “alone”, without even knowing who will be my cabin roommate. Luckily I was partnered up with an awesome roommate with who I quickly made friends with. Getting to know to her was actually one of my highlights of the whole cruise – it is not always easy to get to know to someone (especially a follower) more deeply during a busy dance event.

The Swinging Xmas Party Weekend was an event I wasn’t supposed to go in the beginning since my plan was to spend the weekend in peace at home relaxing and doing Christmas things. However, I got a message on the last minute from a dance friend and, to be honest, it wasn’t that hard to convince me to join the event after all. I’m pretty pleased that I went because not only did I find the workshops useful I also got to hang out with my best friend and the new friend I made in the boat cruise. As a cherry on the top I won the novice JnJ competition on Saturday and now have the next WCS event booked: Neverland Swing 2015 in the end of February. Woohoo!

Novice JnJ winners.

These two events brought me back some feelings I haven’t had for a while. Not long time ago did I write about scary advanced dancer phenomenon and all of the sudden I went from that into being a worried beginner dancer. Not long ago did I declare that advanced dancers like to dance also with beginners and soon after I am the one who needs to be convinced about that. In the parties I felt like I wouldn’t be fun to dance with and got shy at asking others to dance with me. Result: not much dancing done. Stressing out that others wouldn’t have fun led into that I didn’t have much fun. Not cool.

At the moment I’m generally quite frustrated about my WCS dancing: I still haven’t got a proper understanding of the basic technique, especially dance posture and stepping, and I know my dancing doesn’t have that WCS touch in it at all. It is a dance style that doesn’t feel natural to me and even though I have really been trying to observe and understand, I still haven’t “got” the right kind of movement to my body. To compare this to Argentinean Tango, for example, it has been pretty easy for me to get the right kind of feeling in it even though I have been practicing it less than WCS, and thus I feel like Argentinean Tango is just more natural way of moving to me. This is exactly what happened with me and Zouk: I instantly felt that the movements in Zouk were almost like made for my body. However, this is not the case with WCS: why I fell for the dance style was because I saw how much fun everyone were having in the dance floor and I wanted to learn to do the same.

I can hear you saying that I just need more practice. Yes I do, but I know just a little practice won’t do it. I can promise to give it a try, really give it a try, but I’m afraid this super fun dance style will never feel natural way of moving for me. Some might say that I’m just being too critical on myself – I won the novice JnJ competition and all last weekend so I shouldn’t be so bad – but I have seen myself dancing and it just doesn’t look as it should. I could settle for being a low intermediate WCS dancer but with my ambition I know that is not going to satisfy me. Even though I would try to say to myself that WCS is just a dance to have fun and not really to polish, in the end I know I would want to go forward and make it look and feel good. Not perfect, but at least to the level that I wouldn’t feel awkward dancing it.

Well, enough with this opening up! I’ll have to wait and see where this dance style takes me – or if it takes anywhere at all.

Greetings from Tango Class.

This fall my Monday evenings have been spent in Argentinean Tango classes. Yesterday was the last class of the season and we had a special Christmas version of the normal classes. The classroom was decorated with candles and Christmas lights, dancers had been dressed nicely and there were sweets, like gingerbreads and fruit cake, as well as glögi served. Unlike the usual classes, you could pop into any/all of the three classes for the price of one. What a nice way to end the season!

I have found Argentinean Tango to be very useful dance style to practice even though I haven’t really been dancing it outside the classes. It is a social dance and the emphasis in the classes has strongly been on leading and following, so the classes has given me a great opportunity to improve my following skills – something that is valuable in regards to any partner dancing style. Misplacing a step with only few centimeters can change the whole dance figure or make the couple lose their balance. I really love this delicate touch that Argentinean Tango has. It has also directed much of my concentration into my frame and rotation of the upper body that, yet again, are crucial things in many dance styles. Also my posture and footwork are something that I feel I have been improving with; I got good feedback especially from my “clean footwork” from our teacher.

If you want to give Argentinean Tango a try, I can highly recommend Tangokoulu’s classes. You will be needing your own partner to the class though since there is no rotation of partners but I have found this pretty good way of practicing the small nuances of the tango technique. I’m not quite sure what my dance spring is going to look like but these classes are very likely to be included. Maybe I will even find the courage of going to a milonga.

DIZC & HZF 2014.

I have been trying to start writing this post for countless of times now. I feel like I have so much in my heart to share but somehow I can't put it to words in the way that I'd like to. I would like to write my feelings down as beautiful as they are inside of me and yet I feel that goal is impossible to achieve. After lingering with this post for more than a month, I decided that something is better than nothing, so here we go.

In the end of October I was fortunate to receive a huge amount of wonderful dancing memories in two really different dance festivals: Dutch International Zouk Congress and Helsinki Zouk Festival. During this intensive dancing period I noticed, even more, that the most beautiful ingredient of partner dancing is exactly those memories that are created together with my dance partners, my fellow dancers and my dance community. Having two intensive dance weekends in a row is definitely an exhausting experience especially if you want to do it the hard-core way - take every possible workshop, dance through the parties from the very beginning until the last song and in between socialize with your dancer friends - but it gives so much in return that somehow you just forget your tiredness, sore feet, the forthcoming work week and keep on dancing. Result: happiness that makes you, well, so speechless that it is hard to write anything down.

Having those two such a different festivals so close to each other gave a nice contrast to both of them. The Dutch congress was a huge event with up to thousand attendees, dozens of artists, packed dance floors (in two floors), live performances, variety of shows and too many great workshops to choose from. There were so many dancers you could loose your friends to the dance floor - no kidding! It was the place to be if you wanted to spend the weekend just dancing and exploring new dance connections. The party was like going to a big candy store; you didn't know which one to pick!

 

The Helsinki festival was pretty tiny against it, but the utmost warm atmosphere was breathtaking, the quality of performances was superb and the parties were one of the best I've ever attended. Maybe it was the quality over quantity that made it shine out so bright from one of the biggest European Zouk events. Really, by far my favorite dance event I have ever been to and I'm not the only one: see, for example, my fellow Zouk dancer's blog post about HZF.

In Helsinki festival I was also given some nice opportunities to experience another side of dance classes: being a dance teacher. Our Rio Zouk Style team gave beginners' classes on Friday to the festival attendees and we all were really happy with the experience. I had the privilege to teach with my own teacher, which of course made things easier for me since he knew exactly what to do in case I got lost. Everything went extremely well and I really liked teaching with him. I must admit, though, that I was pretty nervous; not really that much about the class itself but the dance demo in the end of it. Two days before I was actually crying in a tram and almost cancelling the whole demo because I felt I would just screw it up badly - we've just had a group practice and I happened to dance exceptionally bad that day. Luckily I didn't and neither did I fall down or screw up; I was actually very pleased with it. Yet another nice dance memory caught in tape.

In addition to the beginner classes, me and Ngirl instructed partner stretching & relaxation classes in the end of both workshop days. We took some elements from partner yoga classes we have been going together and set our goal as to calm down the participants after their hectic days. In the beginning it seemed a hard task but in the end both classes were extremely successful and many came to tell us how much they loved it. It felt so amazing to see everyone living in the moment, concentrating on their partner and dropping down everything. It was simply beautiful.

How do you like my Halloween party costume on Friday night's party?

It always hits me. I know what an amazing feeling dancing can give me. I know how deeply I can loose myself into a dance. I know all this, but when I feel it, the intensity of the feelings can really blow my mind away. I still remember, after more than 5 weeks, how amazed I was after dancing in HZF parties. There were so many good dances I couldn't choose "the dance" of the night. So many great dancers that time was lost too fast to dance enough with all of them. Not a single moment I would have felt uncomfortable, lost or disappointed on the dance floor. The atmosphere was so captivating, music so inspiring and dancers so connective that the dance flow hit me from the first dance on and before I noticed it was already time to go home. Purely ecstatic from the beginning to the end!

Well, as I was afraid, the above didn't pass on the beautiful feelings as I would have wanted. You see, this one weekend spent in HZF in the middle of dark autumn (combined with the great "warm up" weekend in Holland) was most probably the highlight of my dance year 2014. Not only because it was my home festival or because I was not only a participant there but most importantly because of the mind blowing dance parties. It is hard to explain exactly what made the parties so amazing (and I'm not talking only for my behalf here!) but if you were there, you know precisely what I mean. We all will be anxiously waiting for the next year's festival.

The Scary Advanced Follower Syndrome.

You could imagine that the better you get in partner dancing, the more everybody would like to dance with you. Sounds pretty logical, right, and actually this logic seems work with leader dancers: when they reach a certain level it will become hard for them to even leave the dance floor in dance parties let alone have time to go and ask someone for dance. Great, a nice reward for the hard work done!

However, when a follower reaches a certain level, instead of having the same reward of a constant dance queue, she is suddenly left alone. There are almost no leaders inviting her to dance and, thus, if she wants to dance she has to make the initiative herself. The question is: why?

A concrete example of this phenomenon can easily be found in any dance congress. All the leader teachers are exhausted after each party because it is impossible for them to leave the dance floor. The girls are literally attaching them just to have one dance with their favorite teacher. But if you pay attention to the follower teachers, they are mostly left in peace – not because they would reject all the dance invitations but because they hardly get any!

I have noticed this happening to myself too. I am rarely asked for a dance in any social dancing events. Of course it is not only the leaders’ task to make the dance invitations but if it is me who has to make the effort again and again, it just doesn’t feel nice. First I thought that maybe there is something wrong with my dancing or with me – I thought others just didn’t like dancing with me! Or maybe all the leaders were simply too busy since there are usually excess amount of followers around. But no, there were too many situations where leaders were making the invites that this could be the ultimate reason.

Then I realized there are some more universal rules happening behind this phenomenon: I call it the scary advanced follower syndrome.

The thing is, when a follower gets into more advanced level, the leaders below her level easily get intimidated by her. The leaders might think that they will not be able to impress her or to make the kind of moves she would like to be led. They might get worried that she will get bored. They might be worried that she will reveal all his mistakes. Thus, she becomes a scary advanced follower in the eyes of the leaders and as a consequence the leaders will start avoiding her.

I have to admit that I can kind of associate with the feeling though. When I started dancing Zouk I was terrified of asking teachers to dance with me and at some point I was even avoiding of getting any dance invites from them. You see, I knew that I wasn’t able to follow many of the moves they normally led and I felt bad when my skills were inadequate to keep up the dance flow. I felt lost especially if I was supposed to do any head movements. As a follower you never know what was going to happen and I was expecting the worst: that something too difficult would come and that I would of course screw it up. However, I don’t see the leaders having the same problem. Leaders know (because it’s their job to decide) what kind of movements there will be and they are familiar with those movements. Since the follower is more advanced it is likely that she will understand what movement the leader wants to lead and thus there will not be any unexpected new movements that could scare off the leader. Also, a more advanced follower is capable of fixing some possible small mistakes the leader makes and thus to add more flow to the dance. So what is the problem?

“Yes, I think you are scary”, I was told when discussing about this topic the other day with my dancer friends. “But don’t take it personally – it’s mostly a matter of a male ego!”


So that is the thing: male ego! Well guys, you better grow some balls and start dancing with everybody because I didn’t spend countless of hours of improving my dancing skills just to be left alone in dance parties! Besides, I’m not looking for advanced or complicated moves or someone to impress me. I just want to dance. It is not that I would like to dance only with advanced leaders – I want to dance with everyone. For me partner dancing is a conversation and I would like to have a big variety of conversations with different kind of dancers, from beginners to professionals and everything in between. So what if I have better technique than you: there will also always be dancers who will have better technique than what I have and that doesn’t make me any worse off. So what if another leader can do "more" than you: sometimes less is more. So what if everything is not working out: make it part of the conversation.

Dancing isn’t all about technique or the level you are in but the way you connect with your partner in that very moment you share together in the dance floor. I'm not expecting showy lifts, crazy combinations or mind-blowing figures. Just feel the dance and enjoy it – and stop putting your male ego in between!

Let me tell you a secret before I finish: I'm not really that scary.