Tapping New Resources

Monday, September 26, 2005

Playing Catch Up

I totally missed writing up last week. It was pretty hectic for some reason, and I never got back to doing something about it. It was just as well, as it was a rough lesson.

We had a guest instructor, who was kind of put on the spot. Tanis was ill, and this new person seemed a little ill-prepared. It was a challenge to stay with her, as well, because I think she thought we were a little farther advanced than we were. Well, than some of us were. Some students are awfully good. Or maybe just looser and more flexibile. (Might have something to do with being a lot younger... what's up with that?)

The one complaint I had was that we really didn't do a lot of warmup routines. Or maybe the warmups felt like full routines. We seemed to dive right into new steps, and we spent some time doing pull backs and another backward move.

Lots of sweating, and trying to keep up, and by the end, completely unable to perform the simplest move, both because my head no longer had any control over my feet, and my leg muscles were simply ready to fall off.

It was a great workout, but an extremely frustrating night.

Tanis was back tonight though. Great, intense warmup, and that was a challenge for me because my calves and ankles were awfully tight (likely form the 16 km run yesterday). But they started to loosen up a little.

After that, we did a lot of things, and as usual, most of it slipped through my brain. There was a lot of traveling stuff, which wasn't too evil. I actually managed to pull off some respectable flaps, with an actual pha-lap sound. Then some riffs, which we'd done in intro, but which I'd forgotten. Didn't take me too long to get them back.

Tanis is adapting a routine from the Fred Astaire film Shall We Dance. Sounds like it's a simplified a little, just for us beginners. But there's some interesting moves, and of course I don't remember much of it.

We also did the Honi Coles Stroll, at least the last, and most complicated step. This is in preparation for the whole thing, which is something we'll be doing in the next couple of weeks.

The Stroll is traditionally done to the Take the A-Train (Count Basie, I think). But we also did another start of a routine to the same tune, and if I understood right, it's some of the Astaire moves. The one part that was so cool was this move that was a kind of twirl combined with a cramp roll. And astoundingly, I actually pulled it off a couple of times! The trick is to not think about it, but to launch into it and just do it at speed. Doing it slow and trying to think it through is where it gets too complex. You also fall down, cuz it's hard to spin like that in slow motion. Actually, you fall down if you do it fast too, cuz your centre of gravity seems to wander away from that stable position over your feet. But I did do it. (no, really!)

Anyway, some of this stuff will hopefully begin to stick in the next few weeks, and maybe I'll even be able to practice some of it.

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