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.