dance-ish

Maybe it's a sad sign for your social life when your version of "going dancing" involves doing a couple of workout dvds led by heavily made up ballroom dance champions in your mom's living room at six am.And yes, yes of course I get up at five to start donning my false lashies, and gluing on the Swarovskis. Gotta "dance right" you know!

Me in my workout gear. 

 But hey, I'm in Bellingham and, believe or not, my mom is not feeling particularly active after her first session of chemo. Besides after two years of looong looong law schooling, I might not be in the best "dance shape" ever. Plus, Azita and I used to do Core Rhythms (essentially a zumba rip off based off of the latin competition syllabus) together when I lived with the Simlers, so it's kind of a misty, nostalgic experience. My favorite part being that the instructors are even more terrifying than your regular exercise instructors (ballroom FABULOUS) and cannot speak particularly cogent english, so it's both amusing and utterly confounding trying to follow their routines. Equally entertaining are the backup dancers (also usually ballroom competitors of slightly lesser status), who alternate between being insanely hammy for the imaginary judges and completely confused and unable to keep up.

Your interrogators - er - instructors for the
session will be... Julia and Jana!

Still, it works my core and legs the way dancing or drilling would and although they don't explain the technique *at all*, my muscle memory can kick in and fill in the gaps (as imperfectly as ever). Keeps the technique hovering in the background and more importantly pushes my endurance. When my major shortcoming is just not being in peak form to take it to my previous intensity level on the floor, it's something that keeps my body current without keeping me up far into the night on work/school nights.

Of course these videos can't teach somebody to dance anymore than tae bo makes you ready to hop in the ring and spar. Well apparently the addendum special features to some of my dvds is an instructional video on latin dancing, but I can't vouch for those. If it were, I suppose paso doble (the only dance they use that I've never studied) actually is a series of pulsing lunges, squats, and calf raises dressed up with pretty hands and fantasies of handsome Australian ballroom dancers removing our collective metaphoric glasses and letting our collective metaphoric ponytails down and then up again with more hair-glue while we crash a ballroom competition in pretty skirts and suddenly the music is cut off but it doesn't matter because the music is in our hearts and eveeryone is clapping and and AND THEN EVERYONE CRIES AS WE... Ok, so maybe the events Strictly Ballroom doesn't actually reoccur in full detail every time I throw in the "leg toning paso doble" video, but in my fantasies it does.

AND LUUUUUUNGE ! These are not my exercise intructors
but Paul here is showing an excellent glute-shaper here
(as well as the sheer unadulterated AMAZINGNESS of
latin pants and cuban heels...)

Ok, but in my fantasies:

Ahem... anyways

When I'm really dancing, I don't dance to exercise, but of course you do have to exercise to dance. And, actually, it's kind of a great exercise if you really go for it. Everyone's into intervals these days and talk about interval training! For dancing, it's necessary to vary intensity not just to be able to continue dancing all night, but to keep the dynamism and musicality. When we worked on choreography, our coaches would tell us that you can't have a lot of fast moves mushed together... it's the contrast between the fast and the pose... the slow and then the sudden burst that really makes the movements pop and keeps the eye engaged. Music, itself, is based on ebb and flow, so staying with it will inevitably involve surges of energy and moments of slowness and stillness. I love the steady rhythm of a long run or a tv watching session on the elliptical, but it's an entirely different sensation. It's almost meditative - time to let my body take over and my brain wander. Yes, you can give yourself complicated circuit workouts or intervals, but it still always seems a little more linear. With dancing - for me - it's full engagement from head to toe, or really from ear to fingertip.

Anyways, speaking of Strictly Ballroom, this movie was kind of my Dirty Dancing. I credit this movie with planting the seeds that brought me to ballroom in the first place, but I may say that it could have perhaps skewed my expectations of the ballroom world. Well, yes the competitors are generally *that* insane, sure. No really, they're mostly quite nice, if somewhat dramatic people. However, you probably won't fall in love (ok you probably will confuse connection on the floor and all that intimacy involved in it and something that survives when the music dies for a few months before you figure dancing out) with your instructor and immediately rise from beginner to competition level dancer as you revolutionize the entire scene.. artistic rom-com license. But on a more personal level, I was perhaps led to believe that the men in the ballroom world would look a little more like this:

(actually a ballet dancer and, yes,
 they really do look like this)

Which might be true, but if they do they were probably long ago recruited by ambitious Russian ingénues and have been on the competitive scene for the last thirty years and are never in the same city for more than a few hours and cost A LOT per minute to dance with.

But usually - let's be honest - they look more like this:

*not* actually ballet dancers

Thank god the dancing was fun in itself.