Form Up Dancers

Because of the eclipse, we didn’t have formation practice last week and it showed. Another issue was that the instructor who designed most of the choreography was not there last night. And it seemed like the two instructors don’t really talk to each other so we were trying to go off a video from two weeks ago but there was much confusion.

At this point, we have the beginning part down fairly well but this one bit just got introduced at the last practice so it was probably too much to expect everyone to remember something we spent about 10 minutes on two weeks ago. The problem, as I said before, is that even the instructor didn’t quite know what was taught so they ended up doing something that made sense to them even if it wasn’t exactly what were given two weeks ago.

It is interesting watching a bunch of different personalities and learning styles trying to get this formation down. I’m lucky because all of this is stuff I’ve done before so it doesn’t freak me out as much.

There are times when I focus less on the actual steps and just on getting where I need to be and making sure I’m on the right foot. For example, there’s a moment when the ladies are doing a free spin. We are supposed to take four steps backwards but it is probably more important to track the lady and be ready to get her back in frame when she’s done with the spin. Makes it kind of hard to explain to people who want to know exactly what to do and you can’t get exact details on how big the steps need to be or even the direction (if your lady spin isn’t quite straight)

My own lesson today wasn’t the best. OwnerGuy came up with a new ending to our FoxTrot routine last week because he thought it would be easier than what we were doing. I made it work on that lesson but, for some reason, I couldn’t make it work today. Basically, we are changing sides to start the West Coast Swing part and I just couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to move to make that happen. So we had to make another change and I could at least make that work (we’ll see what happens the next time we do it).

It can be very frustrating to watch someone do something and then not be able to figure out how to do it yourself. It always looks easy when an instructor does something and I’m listening to what they say but, when I try to do it, it’s like they were speaking a different language. I can’t really learn something until I actually do it so when I can’t make it happen, it does get frustrating.

The funny thing is that when my body finally clicks and figures it out, then it always is way easier than I thought it was. I know I get to the point of over complicating and hyper focusing on what I’m supposed to do and that usually doesn’t end well. It can be hard for me to pull myself out of that head space when I keep trying and not getting it done.

But we finished with a couple of dances where I was more comfortable with the changes so at least the lesson ended well.