Dance! - The Road to Heavies: lesson 27, May 9, 2014. A very bad floor...

When I leave the ferry, I meet some of my classmates and that's for the better. On Kingsnight (The night before Kingsday) many doors of the hall were dance-class is held were open, now everything looks completely shut and I have no idea how to enter. My fellow dancers luckily know how to get in. On the outside of the large door, there is a small door for personnel but you really need to know it's there, otherwise you probably won't find it.

When the teacher arrives at scene, the room we normally use appears to be in use by someone else. One of my classmates puts her arms in the air while sighing 'hooray' in a sarcastic manner. This makes me believe that there is something wrong with the other room.

Even more primitive

My thoughts are right. Compared to Haarlem and the Hague, I found the other room in Amsterdam already to be rather primitive, lacking a changing room and large mirrors and a floor that was not about to fall apart. This floor is far worse.

While the protective flooring is held together better, the supporting floor is everything but leveled. The floor contains ridges, holes and bulges everywhere.
I would even call it dangerous to be honest: for the girls it's probably just a little bit easier to adjust to a missed step because of a hole or ridge.
If this would be our regular floor, I would probably go back to the Hague straight away. This all not to blame the teacher: she can't help it that the other room is in use by total surprise.

When I try to practice some things on my soft-shoes and two girls next to me batter away on their heavy shoes, I can only stop. The wooden floor is so badly supported that I bounce up and down centimeters and even have a hard time standing up straight under the violent steps of two pairs of heavy shoes next to me.

Practice on the concrete then...

The teacher even says it's probably a better idea to practice on the concrete. This is not recommended most of the time because of the risk of slipping and injuries because of the very hard surface you dance on, but also because the heavy shoes don't like it.

I don't really mind. Last week, the hall was warm and damp and this time, it's none the different. In the big hall, the air is much more cool and not as damp, so I'd rather dance there.

A lot of new steps... now how to remember them...

I leave with 4 new steps. Two for the Beginners Single Jig and two for my Treble Jig.
In reality, there are actually 3 new steps, as the two new steps for my heavy shoes belong together.
Sometimes, I wrote down what I had to practice when I was still in Haarlem, but now I did not bring anything to write on. I will find out the next week that I hardly remember what I have to do, how the movement went exactly or what the order of steps was.

Only one of the steps for my heavy shoes stays in my mind, just because it's a rather hard one. After a certain move, I like to place my weight on the same foot, while I should be dancing on with my other foot. As it is one of the most logical things to do, as so many steps feature a kind of flow where you always dance on with the other foot than the one you end with.