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Dancing with the not remotely famous people
Yesterday evening Maria and I donned our glad rags and headed out for our first ballroom dancing competition. We've been doing the dancing thing for a bit more than a year now, after watching Dancing with the Stars convinced Maria that this was something we should do and I decided that dancing lessons were a good Christmas present.
Competition should not be taken to mean that Maria and I have got good at this. Ballroom dancing is comfortingly hierarchical and dancers proceed from bronze, to bronze star, to silver, to sliver star, to gold, to gold star. (There are bits after that, but I don't know what they are). Assuming all goes well we'll be bronze star in a couple of weeks.
Bronze star can be summed up as 'just enough education to perform'
Silver star would be 'wow, they really know what they're doing'
Gold star would be 'I bet that takes a lot of practice!'
Still, there was a contest, and we danced. There were many good things, it was fun, the people were nice, there was a chance to see what the 'next level up' looks like. There was a chance to be competitive, although not that much, at least not at our level.
The contest was divided into two bits, ballroom (waltz, tango, quickstep) and latin (cha cha cha, rumba and jive). After an initial round finalists were selected in each category for a repeat performance. Our ballroom went badly, which is annoying, because we're usually quite good, so we didn't make the cut. Our latin went better, making the cut and finishing third overall (for bronze) Hurrah!. Best bit was someone telling us that he hoped we did well because we looked like we were having so much fun, and too many people looked too serious.
Other things I learned
* You can tell how competitive people are by whether they have different outfits for different styles or not
* During the warmup it is not your job to avoid collisions with people who are better than you. It's their job.
* The shape of the floor makes a surprising amount of difference
* Dancing properly to Greased Lightning (from Grease) is very hard and should not be attempted by beginners if they want to stay in time as it is very very fast indeed
* The quickstep is a silly dance
* All the old dutch songs people like to dance to are quicksteps
* If you roll up your sleeves and remove your tie you instantly become 100% more latin
Competition should not be taken to mean that Maria and I have got good at this. Ballroom dancing is comfortingly hierarchical and dancers proceed from bronze, to bronze star, to silver, to sliver star, to gold, to gold star. (There are bits after that, but I don't know what they are). Assuming all goes well we'll be bronze star in a couple of weeks.
Bronze star can be summed up as 'just enough education to perform'
Silver star would be 'wow, they really know what they're doing'
Gold star would be 'I bet that takes a lot of practice!'
Still, there was a contest, and we danced. There were many good things, it was fun, the people were nice, there was a chance to see what the 'next level up' looks like. There was a chance to be competitive, although not that much, at least not at our level.
The contest was divided into two bits, ballroom (waltz, tango, quickstep) and latin (cha cha cha, rumba and jive). After an initial round finalists were selected in each category for a repeat performance. Our ballroom went badly, which is annoying, because we're usually quite good, so we didn't make the cut. Our latin went better, making the cut and finishing third overall (for bronze) Hurrah!. Best bit was someone telling us that he hoped we did well because we looked like we were having so much fun, and too many people looked too serious.
Other things I learned
* You can tell how competitive people are by whether they have different outfits for different styles or not
* During the warmup it is not your job to avoid collisions with people who are better than you. It's their job.
* The shape of the floor makes a surprising amount of difference
* Dancing properly to Greased Lightning (from Grease) is very hard and should not be attempted by beginners if they want to stay in time as it is very very fast indeed
* The quickstep is a silly dance
* All the old dutch songs people like to dance to are quicksteps
* If you roll up your sleeves and remove your tie you instantly become 100% more latin
