Worky Worky, Dancy Dancy

Crazy week - tons of teaching.  I'm so personally invested in this career endeavor that I spend hours of unpaid time researching and preparing lessons and plans for my clients...  It's fun to be a little bit stressed out, and it's great to never be bored, but I'm oscillating at all times between a buzz of excitement to full-blown anxiety.  I think it's burning a lot of energy.  My first observations are next week and I'm terrified, but my mentor called me today and we talked for an hour about standards and the goals of observation, and I feel much better.

My headset is my friend.

In about 40 minutes, I'm taking the metro to Studio 2720 to have my first full-blown standard lesson with R and his coach, who is apparently a national champion.  I'm nervous because I am sure to be awkward, but determined because it's the only way to get better.  R picked me up on Wednesday evening and took me from the Berri-UQAM metro station to Conseil des Arts, where we had an entire ballroom all to ourselves for one hour.  It was gorgeous - sparkling lighting, a black baby grand Yamaha in the corner, soaring windows overlooking Rue Sherbrooke at twilight - and all for 9.50 an hour.  We split the negligible cost.

We worked on silver chacha for the majority of our hour, and then we did some foxtrot.  He isn't sure about the follower's choreography for his gold routine, so we really need this lesson tonight.  I suspect I need desperate help with my frame, but R says it feels solid.  Gold?  Really?  I discovered that R used to be a high-placing (top three) gold dancer in all dances before his partner stopped dancing.  It's really intimidating, but he insists, insists on this partnership because he's having a lot of fun.  Apparently, his ex-partner was quite a snob.

A little bit of ballroom background for the uninitiated.  There are two schools of dancesport; American and International.  I dance International exclusively, but American is very popular and tends to be a lot more gaudy, in my opinion, while International is more...  Finessed?  Difficult?

So!  In the International school, there are two categories of dances; Latin and Standard. Latin includes chacha/rumba, samba, jive and paso doble.  Standard includes waltz, foxtrot, tango, quickstep and Viennese waltz.  Somebody who dances all of them is called a Ten Dancer.  I can only dance nine of them - I've never learned paso.

And, for all of these dances, there are 7 amateur (meaning non-professional) levels, in increasing skill - newcomer, bronze, silver, gold, novice, pre-champ and champ.  Novice and above dancers are much less constrained than dancers in the levels below them, who have to adhere to a strict syllabus of figures or risk being disqualified.  There are also Junior, Youth and Senior divisions to keep kids and old people competing within their age groups.

So, I am pretty much silver.  R is gold, and better than me.  Sigh.

Snow is forecasted for tomorrow.  If it truly snows (meteorologists up here tend to disagree widely and nobody actually knows what will happen), I will take pictures.