Everybody Have Fun Tonight

Had a second coaching lesson last night. The nice thing was he came right over before the lesson and said he enjoyed watching me dance. It may be something they just do automatically, but I kind of feel like I made an impression. OK, I’m pretty sure I made an impression.

The lesson was great and I’ve got a lot of video to look at. Decided before I went in that I wanted to work on one of the dances we had just added for this Showcase. Figured it would be a great opportunity to get a solid foundation and he threw a lot of stuff at us but it was all great. Really just stuff on how to make the dance more fun and to change up how it looks. Really think it is going to help a great deal.

As I mentioned before, this is the semi-annual festival where you earn points by doing things like signing up and paying for new lessons so PJ and I had a short conversations at the end of the lesson. I guess part of it is that she needs to put a plan together to justify the number of lessons they want me to buy.

When you do a competition, there are open and closed categories. In closed, you can’t use anything above the syllabus level you signed up for. In the open, you are free to do whatever you want. Initially, I thought it would be fun to get open routines for some of the dance but this last Showcase kind of changed my mind.

I may have mentioned this but, with the crowded floor, it was hard for them to do the flashy things. And it felt like some of them were more focused on making sure they got all the pieces in rather than just enjoying the dance. Now, they may have enjoyed it but it didn’t seem like something I would enjoy.

Of all the pros on the floor, the one guy I enjoyed watching the most didn’t seem to have set patterns. He might have but if he didn’t have room, he’d just improvise a bit until something cleared up. It just looked cool and natural. I think I’d rather be more like that. Just dancing without worrying as much about making sure we completed the pattern in the designated order.

I know it won’t be easy because the benefit of a pattern is it takes some of the thinking out of it. Muscle memory kicks in and you don’t get stuck in your mind thinking “what do I do next”. But it would be nice to be less a slave to the pattern and more just dancing.