Dance Lesson Number Two took place last night and was a study in lowering the bar. When we were good, we were very…OK. But when we were bad, we were awful.<\/p>\n
At times, we seemed to be really dancing, moving as a couple with the music and feeling only a little like the step-counting robots from last week. That feeling invariably passed, however, as our tenuously-grasped rhythm sputtered, died, and left us standing there with a single recurring phrase on our lips: “let’s start over.” (At least we were synchronized at that<\/em> point.)<\/p>\n Repitition is the operative term. The class was essentially a duplicate of last week’s, and that was good. I remembered exactly one of the seven steps we were introduced to in that first class, and I don’t think I was alone in my inability to retain the moves. We started from scratch and went through each step: foxtrot, waltz, cha-cha…and so on. We added a couple of new moves here and there — the tango corte<\/i>, for example — but overall we simply tried to deepen our neural grooves by a picometer, hoping that the basics would stick with us for at least an hour after class, instead of disappearing in ten minutes like they did before.<\/p>\n I’ve also begun to realize that I have no natural ear for music and rhythm, in terms of knowing which dance goes with which music. We spent a little time at the end of class listening to music, then attempting to match the right step to it. The Latin rhythms all seem the same to me (except for the tango, which is becoming my dance of choice, I think because it’s the only one where we spell out the steps instead of count them). I dread the day when I’ll suffer the fatal humiliation of attempting to mambo to what will be obvious to everyone else is a cha-cha. It’s inevitable, and there’s nothing I can do to prevent it.<\/p>\n Regardless, we soldier on, and take our victories where we find them. No one got hurt and the instructor generally was successful in containing her laughter. Lesson #3 is a week away, and I must go practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Halfway through the course, and back to square one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dancing-ballroom","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5680,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2870\/revisions\/5680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}