I attended the Lindustrial Revolution Lindy hop exchange in Charlottesville, VA on Memorial Day weekend. I had more fun than should be legal and gathered a lot to think about. In my somewhat obsessive thoughts about the experience, I wrote several emails to friends (mostly Emily). These entries are culled from those.
It's important to remember that I am an Intermediate Lindy hopper. I've really only been dancing and trying to improve consistently for about a year, although I learned about five years ago and have been dancing sporadically since 2007. All of my comments are tempered by that relative inexperience.
To read all the posts in this series, click on the "Dancestravaganza series" tag.
After having not progressed in the Jack and Jill, I had my eyes set on the advanced track of lessons/workshops. To get into the advanced track, you attended a sort of mini audition. If you wanted to try out, you danced to several songs with different partners. The instructors watched and pulled the folks they think were advanced into the advanced track.
We did three dances and I danced as well as I could. It was a little sad, actually. As the dances progressed, the people who thought they were more advanced got more stressed by not being picked for advanced. My last dance was with my marine and we sort of looked at each other and shrugged as it ended. We were intermediate dancers. I gave him one of my We Won! high fives and said we were the winners. He looked puzzled at me, and I said, "Well, we're both here, so it has to be the winners level."
It's possible that's not how the Marines operate.
So a couple of things I've been proud of in my dancing are my hips and my strength. I may not salsa well, but I salsad first. My hips are prominent and I can jut them like nobody's business. And my upper body strength! I can bench press my body weight. That takes some strength. I am not a weak woman.
And in the first intermediate lesson, I was called out on... both of those things. As a result of trying to "make interesting shapes," I was totally over-thinking something as simple as stepping. In my rock step I was stepping too far back, jutting a hip, and basically breaking up all of the lines and athletic body stance you might expect to see in this dance. I was crouching and jutting with all my might. The instructor walked over.
"That rock step? Try to keep it more in line with your body. It just looks a little awkward right now."
The second thing the instructor told me was that I looked like I was getting jerked around on the dance floor by a lead who was most decidedly not my Marine buddy. The lead was shorter than me and, frankly, I could bench press the heck out of him. In attempting to wait until the last possible moment to decide which direction to go ("following on a dime" was how I was thinking about it), I was allowing my shoulders to be pulled out of line with my body, and was following through my arms rather than through my body.
These criticisms are totally valid, but I couldn't help feeling silly about them. "Hey, I'm strong!" I thought, "and my hips are rocking!" But then I spent some time thinking about how I've been approaching dancing a little bit wrong: shapes and following on a dime are less important than following well and with your whole body, and being connected to all your extremities (and hips!) and to the music.
As my understanding of how to be the best dancer I can be changes, it will be interesting to see how it will change. Something Nina Gilkenson said in a recent interview, nobody can tell you how your body moves. For the moment, though, I am very grateful to the instructor. It made me reevaluate how I do things in dancing, and I think it will make everything more awesome in general.
But it was nothing like the revelation that was to come. Stay tuned for episode 3!
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