Dance! - The Road to Heavies: lesson 1. October 7, 2011
How many people will there be? I can't think of the size of the class I will be attending, but the theatre, a former church located against the border between Haarlem and Heemstede-Aerdenhout, should offer enough space for at least 8 people.
Well, that is a little much thought. There are only 3 dancers, excluding the tutors.
I didn't remember the steps I practiced for this first 'real' class completely right, so I was immediately corrected.
Something that got to me was something silly, or more, silly compared to what one can achieve in Irish dancing. The movement from 'heels together' to 'right foot in front'. It is something small, but I found practicing this with the teacher extremely addictive.
In this class, I already had to cope with a higher tempo, which proved very hard to do.
In disbelief I heard the teacher say that the speed of the music was even higher...
When he said that I had to dance the basic movement, the 1-2-3, eight times in a circular pattern, the so called lead-around, I was even more surprised.
Even 'worse': I had to end at the place where I started dancing.
I gave the teacher a troubled look: So soon already? For my belief I hardly knew this basic movement. Ofcourse, I tried, but it didn't look like much at all. I panicked when I got close to the teacher if I even managed to do the same movement twice to three times in a row: as soon as I started thinking about the moves, things went wrong.
Also a hard thing to deal with: taking smaller steps to cover less distance. I keep taking a kind of leaps, which make me literally facing the mirror after only two 1-2-3's.
The teacher shows me that you can perform the same movement without even moving from the spot where you are standing.
Some Golden Wisdom also comes to practice: an advanced dancer is able to perform on a tile placed in a diagonal form. More surface isn't really needed: by being stationary while moving his feet, he remains in the same place.
When it comes to something like that, I still have a lot to practice, but that was the reason I started taking these classes.
My sore muscles came to haunt me for the next 2 days after: learning to stretch and take warm-ups before dancing had just started, so this had to be expected.