December 09, 2005, 3:21 a.m.
I had an amazing dance tonight. One of those dances that makes you smile at the beginning, so content to be in the arms of the person you are dancing with that if you were a cat you would purr, and then proceeds to take you on a winding path, alternately sweet and playful, dark and sexy. It left me breathless and sort of high for the rest of the night. Well, that and I didn't get much sleep last night.
Who was the lead, one might ask? I finally got up the nerve to ask one of the teachers, and I was very, very glad I did. And he actually thanked me for the dance at the end of the night - in Spanish. I get to use all my languages at tango; I speak only Spanish with this teacher and another guy from Cataluña; I just met a Swiss guy who I speak French with, and I occasionally use Japanese with Nobu, someone I get rides with. Anyway can you believe it? HE thanked ME for the dance ... I was so stunned I didn't know what to say, so I sort of stammered something incoherent. Yeah. It was hot.
Actually, I had quite a beautiful day. I had a good ballet class (two really good, really solid turns ... it's pretty unforgettable when that happens, because it doesn't happen a lot). I then talked on the phone with my Mom while I hiked up San Francisco hills until I reached the Grace cathedral, where I flopped down on the grass and contemplated life under a soft, wintry sky at the top of the city before heading home for some hot food and a relaxing evening baking brownies and oatcakes and working on essays. Clearly, the oatcakes were for me and brownies were for friends. :)
Other observations about training:
- You can only reach a certain level doing what I'm doing. To really train, you need to be in the studio dancing 6-8 hours a day. I think that only really happens if you're performing, or in a company. I wish I could do that, I'd love to know what it feels like.
- I see dance audition notices and I think two things: 1) I'm not good enough yet; 2) I'm leaving this area in 2 months. What's the point?
- It's easy to make tango look pretentious.
- I feel really confused and bewildered about life right now. Not all of life, I suppose, but my dance life.
I stand in ballet class and I wonder, "Do I want to be the best in this class?" Do I want to be a real ballerina? Not really. I go to tango, get frustrated in group classes, and listen to the music which I don't really like, and wonder, "Is this really what I want to do?" But then I see really great tango dancers, who just look beautiful and wicked and stylish, and I think "Yes, I want to master this dance."
What's odd is that in each of my disciplines I know what I need to do to improve. For tango, I need to start taking private lessons, asking the teachers to dance at practicas, and get someone to videotape me so I can see what I'm doing wrong. I should really be taking one private lesson per week. I also need to be more aggressive about asking really good people to show me new things. The problem with this is that a lot of the really good dancers are not particularly good teachers. For ballet, I need to set aside time to practice turns, more than anything. I need to do dance-specific strength training every day, calf raises and holding passés and trying - really trying - to improve my turns. Because I'm pretty sure that if I practice every day, I'll improve, and once you really learn how to do turns, it's like riding a bicycle; you'll never forget.
The odd thing is that despite the fact that I know (more or less) what I need to do, I haven't done it ... it's like I have a block or something against actually doing it. Does that happen to anyone else, that the thing you know you must do, you know will help you improve in life, is the one thing you are slow at accomplishing, or incapable of doing for some reason? I'm embarrassed somehow to ask teachers for private lessons, and also embarrassed to ask them to dance. Although I have to say that tonight's experience has demonstrated that most of the time that I dance with those people, they seem to have a good time. As in, it's not charity, so really, it's just me getting hung-on on my own perceived inadequacy, which isn't really inadequacy, it's just inexperience, and doesn't appear to faze many leads. The point of all that is to say that I'm going to try and get over myself and accomplish these dance goals.
This blog entry is dedicated to my favorite punk rocker. You always make me feel special, and "intellectually beautiful" is one of the best compliments I have ever received. Boiling day in Singers.
Language spot:
I swear, I'm not making this up: (actual excerpt from essay)
"All these courses draw me to the interdisciplinary field step by step and I am potty about it."
And in a continuation of guess-what-the-non-native-speaker-was-trying-to-say game:
"Although the employee’s understandings were different, learners were checking on the answers pretending understands the education greatly to avoid troublesome."
