Standard at Galaxy, the aftermath, and photos.

I never followed up from my previous post. The Standard part of the competition went fine. One of my favorite coaches from the midwest who probably did not remember me and had no idea I took a lesson from him at one time - Bill Sparks - even came up to us afterward and said, "good job!" That made my day. Probably by the nature of Standard, our dancing wasn't amazing, but it didn't make me cringe when I watched the video. Latin makes me cringe almost always.

Like I mentioned in my last post, we decided to scale down our latin routines. We've trimmed them severely and essentially made them syllabus, which I'm totally ok with. It's such a great feeling to do a simple figure and work on the movement instead of racking your brain trying to remember where your feet go or hope you keep your balance during the syncopation. We're still struggling to remember some parts, because our old routines are still in our bodies, but I hope we can pull it together by the end of the month.

For those of you not on my facebook or instagram, here are some photos from the event:

 This photo is of Ibrahim sewing my large stones on my dress...and me wearing them! *Teamwork*

 This is a start, but hoping to make these jumps bigger in the future. 

Galaxy Dancesport Competition - Latin

We competed on Thursday evening in Latin at Galaxy Dancesport Festival and I was terribly nervous. I was afraid of forgetting my routines and with good reason: they were complicated and had sections that were similar enough to confuse. Also, we were the only couple in our event. This meant that we would "win" regardless, but also that we would be the only ones on the floor. If we messed up, we were front and center. During open warm ups, I continued to drill sections, with or without Ibrahim. I just had to get through these few sections of Cha Cha - our first dance - and I'd be ok.

 As luck had it, they combined our event with open Latin, so we had another amateur couple to compete with. It made me feel a little better to share the focus with others on the floor. That's such a change from when I was a young child. I loved being the center of attention at dance recitals. My teachers would actually PUT me in the center of my peers because I was the most charismatic. Twenty five years later, though, I am exceedingly nervous when asked to demonstrate or perform by myself. I wonder what happened.

We got out on the floor and messed up our Cha Cha almost immediately. Ibrahim's mind went somewhere else and he started changing our choreography. When we realized we weren't in a good position to continue, we floundered for several seconds and it was obvious. My mind was confused until Ibrahim did something I recognized. Then we were ok, but I continued to make mistakes. Not huge ones, but ones that would make me cringe when watching the videos. We made it through samba and rumba ok. Still made mistakes, but they didn't throw us off. One of our standard coaches, Artem, was there watching. When we left the floor, he gave us both hugs and said we needed to have drinks before we went on the floor to help us relax. He told us good job, but it felt like consolation.

Ibrahim talked to Artem afterward about our dancing. Artem told him that we did some things better than the other couple, but we were also all over the place and doing choreography way over our heads. The other couple, whose dancing was smaller and simpler, would beat us because they were cleaner. That stung. Going into the competition, we definitely thought we were technically better, but it turns out we weren't. If we were stronger than them on some things we masked it with our inability to do anything else well.

 Ibrahim and I had a conversation about our dancing on the 2.5-hour drive home. This performance left me disappointed. I was unhappy with myself for being so anxious. I thought I could have danced better, but my nervousness about losing my balance and forgetting my choreography got in the way. I also felt like we had a mountain in front of us. We had spent over four months building three new Latin routines that we couldn't actually dance. It shouldn't take that long. We barely spent any time working on basics - the quality of our dancing. Our next comp was in less than two months and if we wanted a chance to qualify for Nationals, we would again need to work on our routines and simplify them. Moreover, I felt that the responsibility of this rested on our shoulders. One of our coaches came up with one of our routines for last season on the fly and for reasons I won't explain here, it it wasn't good. So my trust in her choreographing dropped. Our other coach - our main Latin coach - for some reason can't tell us "no." I like her as a person and she's become like family to me. However, she can't seem to gauge our level or tell us not to do something if we aren't ready for it. If we look at a move by a professional couple and say we want to do that, she helps us incorporate it into our routine. She doesn't say, "no, that is above your level, you should be doing X instead." As students, we're clueless. We don't always know that we can't do something. We need someone to guide us, at least until we're experienced enough to understand better what we're doing. Our Standard coaches tell us what to do all the time, because they know we don't understand certain concepts yet.

 We watched our videos when we got home. They weren't as horrible as we thought, but I had hoped for better. Ibrahim thought our dancing was an accurate display of our level and our ability. We decided not to rebuild our routines completely, but we will try to simplify them where we can.

 We compete in Standard on Saturday. Hopefully those dances will go better.

Photoshoot

It finally happened! I finally had the dance photoshoot I've been waiting for. The studio had an urban vibe to it - high ceilings, brick walls. A small sprung dance floor surrounded by lighting equipment was on the far side. The building was cooled by only a swamp cooler, so it was humid.

We began the shoot with me dancing until he saw something he wanted to focus on. He would choose a pose and then have me move through it. He would take a picture, examine it, and then have me adjust: turn my hips 15 degrees counterclockwise, bring my left shoulder toward him, look slightly down, break the wrist line, put my arms above my head, soften the fingers, jump, keep my feet together tight, and point the toes. He'd give me 5-6 instructions at a time and then build from there. Inevitably I'd forget something. He'd then remind me or I'd say, "Oh I forgot! Let me try again!" We would do the pose 7-8 times and he would take one shot for each take. Sometimes in the middle of a pose he would say, "Oh! You gave me an idea!" and we would try something different.

Every so often, I would look at each set of photos we took throughout the session. I was struck by the contrast between what I felt and images I portrayed on camera. I realized that taking photos is like any performance art: the emotion you convey to the audience is not something you actually feel. What you feel is purely physical - you're going through the list of tasks you need to accomplish: eyes closed, chin down, feet together, jump. I could immediately relate this to when I'm dancing in a showcase or performing theatre on stage: I rarely ever felt anything, I just followed my instructions/training. However, it became even clearer to me in this photo session that feeling emotion and showing emotion are two completely different things.

While Ed did some directing of our time, a lot of it was spent collaborating and some decisions were completely left up to me. He would take a series of photos and then have me look at them. I would look at the positioning of my head/shoulders/hands/feet/legs and then get back on the floor to angle them more, give more extension, or relax.

About three quarters through the session, my toes started hurting. I reached down to touch them and realized I was getting blisters, and the skin was coming off on one of them. I had done everything barefoot until that point, which I wasn't used to - usually I had suede under my feet. But I didn't want to stop the shoot. As long as I wasn't bleeding, I'd keep going. We did two more costume changes.

After nearly four hours, we called it a day. I was worn out, my feet were beat up, and I was sweating a ton from the humidity and heat. All in all, it was a good experience. Before I walked out of the studio, I was already thinking about how and when I would do it again and what I would change for next time :).

I included some of the photos from the shoot below (we took hundreds of shots). These are all raw images that have zero editing. I chose three from the entire batch Ed gave me and he will give them the final polish. Those proofs are not here and I'll show their final versions in a future post.