Dare to be stupid

Want to make a dancer with 29 years of experience feel like a complete novice? Put her in a ballroom class. After taking a few months' worth of classes in International Standard, I have a new appreciation for the 14 years I had to learn ballet when I was growing up. Thanks, Mom, for starting me when I was three! I know I can learn the ballroom technique, but I doubt I'll ever feel the same mastery of it that I feel of ballet. I'm not trying to say that I'm the world's greatest ballerina, just that I'm very comfortable with the movement vocabulary. And speaking of vocabularies, I'm having to learn a whole new one for ballroom. You've seen below my explorations of "telemarks" and "cortés." (I could go off on about five different tangents at this point, but let's not derail my train of thought.) My teacher recites the names of each step as he demonstrates it, but, as I'm discovering, it's a great deal more difficult to learn a combination when you have to remember the components of the steps (or "patterns" as they like to call them) in addition to the order. In ballet class, the teacher could call out "jeté, jeté, pas de bourreé, ballotté," and I would know what to do without having to think, "Ok, start by brushing my right foot to the side, jump off my left, and land with my right foot replacing it," et cetera. I'm not crazy about an art form that's been codified to the extent ballroom has, but one advantage of that, at least for blogging, is that I already know how to spell the pattern names from staring at the charts, trying to match what we did in class with "LF, backing LOD...." I had to look up spellings for half the ballet terms above! I suppose it helps that most of the terms are in English and not French. It's actually kind of fun to feel stupid in a dance class. I've always loved learning, and this gives me a chance to learn something entirely new about one of the things I love best, dancing. It may also give me new insight on teaching ballet to adult beginners. Ballet knowledge is definitely making it easier to learn ballroom, but more on that in a later post.