Hyperreal

I’ve just had a weekend of dancing in Perth at Lindsay’s “Dance Fever” on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, finishing the weekend off with just a bit of dancing in Glasgow…

Had a really good time, though I’m still suffering today… Sore all over… Think I’ve come down with a cold though…

Anyway, we’ll do this in chronological order…

(I’ve moved most of the negative/subjective/less interesting stuff to the end of this post…)

Travelled up to Perth by train, got there about half past 6, registration was smooth and simple, and I was in my room in no time, ready in good time for dinner at 7.

I was surprised to be fitted with a wrist-band. I understand the motivation, as there’s lots of people milling around the hotel during the day and evenings. That said, I saw that a few people had taken their arm-bands off before the end of the first day, with people complaining they were an irritation. Most of the time I was OK with mine, but during the parties or when I was just generally hot and sweaty, the wrist-band was a bit of a pain, though once you were dancing you hardly noticed it…

Dinner was pleasant, with good company.

The Friday freestyle started at 9, though I didn’t come down until maybe half-9. There wasn’t anyone dancing when I arrived, but it soon got going. Unfortunately, as the dance got going, so did the amplifier… It kept cutting out – over-heating apparently. It wasn’t the only one suffering from the heat. Even though there was air-conditioning in the room (and I assume it was on and working) it didn’t make much of a difference. Opening the fire doors to the outside did help a lot.

I had a really good night… There were lots of dancers I knew – some of which I hadn’t seen for a while… Good to see all of them. Lots of other fine dancers I didn’t know… I normally stick to dancing mainly with people I know, but at an event like this, it’s both important and necessary to dance with people you don’t know. Made some good discoveries of dancers I need to watch out for in future.

The music was very much to my taste. It helps when it’s a DJ you know, and typically find you like the selection of. One or two dancers said they’d never heard the track we were dancing to, whilst I knew the song very well having danced to it dozens of times. We had a change of DJ later, who brought more swing music to the room. Not my thing, but well suited to the crowd, many of whom came from a swing-dance background…

The night finished with two cracking fast tracks and I had a good and a really great partner for. My last dance must have been my best of the night.

I felt I was dancing very well (for me!) on Friday night. I got told most emphatically I had an excellent lead, which I was chuffed at. I also got some good wiggly stuff into my dancing. Lots of fun.

Finished at 1am, and was in bed before 2. Woke up at around 6 though, so was a bit tired through Saturday…

Anyway, let’s see what Saturday was all about…

Although there were two streams of classes which you could switch between, I kept in the main room, doing only MJ and WCS classes, after the Line Dancing fun warm up. I missed Cha-Cha, Mambo, Belly Dancing, and Salsa as a result, but I’ve done a bit of all of them, except belly dancing, before…

So, here we go…

• Line Dancing. A fun and energetic start to the day… James is a very entertaining teacher and had us all laughing and dancing in no time.

• West Coast Swing. Lindsay and Brady started from scratch, teaching us to walk before doing a few basic WCS moves… Sugar Push, Sugar Tuck, Underarm Turn, and Basket I think were the moves we did.

  I found it all mostly manageable, though my foot work wasn’t always so good… And when I was busy getting the footwork sorted, I had a tendency to then forget what move I was doing… But then I do that in Ceroc too even without fancy footwork…

  I did find though that my footwork improved a lot as soon as the music came on. I don’t know for sure, but perhaps the structure of the music helped keep me straight, or maybe it just helped block out other distractions. Hmm…

  Quite enjoyed it overall.

• MJ Lead and Follow. This was taught by Keith and Janey. Most of this class was working on the connection between dancers in a closed position. From here it was mostly mambo steps… forward and back, turns, that sort of thing. The basic turn was mambo step forward L, turning out of the way for the girl to follow a cross-body lead. Back R, as the girl passes in front, and step together to face the girl. Similar for both a CW or ACW turn for the girl, just a different lead with the LH.

  Also did a quick swivel/jump/lift thing, but I don’t think it went so well in a class of mixed abilities with rotation. But it was only a wee extra bit of fun.

  Quite good, but don’t think I learnt a great deal… I do need to increase my confidence in doing mambo-steps though.

Lunch… Soup and sandwiches from the hotel… Now for the afternoon…

• Funky MJ Based on the attendance of this class, L&B taught some fairly simple moves made a little funky and fancy. Nothing too complex… Got to say the zig-zag/point-point (apparently from Lindy?) travelling return was a truly horrible move and I didn’t find anyone else in the class who liked it either. Can’t say I got much from this class – maybe aimed a bit low for me.

• Advanced MJ This was a good follow-on to K&J’s first class, though it got much more advanced. Some nice twisty stuff. And a nice dip with a step-over. Cool stuff. Again though with the mixed abilities and rotation of partners, it was sometimes impossible to do the moves with the partner you had – I know also that the girls had problems with guys who couldn’t lead the moves and who didn’t give a feeling of safety when doing the dippy stuff…

• WCS James took this class. Didn’t go so well… This was a very popular class, but the numbers made controlling the class difficult. James admitted he doesn’t have much experience of doing classes with rotations and spare dancers.

  With problems with the rotations, too many people in the class, and a general disorganised feel to the whole thing, it wasn’t the best class of the weekend. I think James needs to get more experience of these kinds of classes if he wants to teach more weekenders and such…

  But we did manage to learn some nice moves which mostly fitted nicely with the moves we learnt in the morning. Let’s think… a Whip, a French Turn (the lady stepping off the sausage, onto the bun…) A wee pose coming out of a whip. Can’t remember, but there must have been one or two others…

  Again, when practising the routine, the music helped me get the footwork right… I began to feel fairly comfortable with the footwork in the simple moves. No-where near perfect, but I felt like I didn’t have to think too hard…

  One girl who’d done a fair bit of WCS told me I was a natural. Not sure about that – I think maybe I’ve just been dancing long enough to begin to get triple-steps now. I wasn’t there at all when I last did West Coast at Pitlochry.

So that was the classes. I then went back to my room and had a good snooze before dinner and the big party on Saturday night…

There were lots more people from all over… It made for a good crowd, but also for a very busy floor, and an even hotter room than the night before.

The party theme was “Celebrity”, and there was a fair number of people who turned up in costume… Marilyn Monroe, Uma Thulman (Kill Bill), Bob the Builder, Cleopatra, Cruella de Ville, Tina Turner, various others, and some folks as generic “celebrities”… I went as a “name known to all” on the Ceroc Scotland forum…

Besides the dancing there was a lucky dip competition, prizes for the best fancy dress and cabaret performances from the teachers and others…

For the “Take a Chance” competition I got lucky, and ended up with Tina Turner (from Aberdeen, I believe)… She’s not my favourite singer by any means, but she’s a really good dancer…

This led to perhaps the first objective confirmation I’ve had that I’m not such a bad dancer – because we got through to the second (& final) round!!!!! We were easily outclassed by some of the competition, but I think we did alright, and I’m proud of our achievement.

I can’t remember who won the fancy dress prizes… Cleopatra and someone else… I don’t think I’ve seen Cleopatra in any of the celeb magazines, but it wasn’t a bad costume…

Later came the cabarets…

• First up was meant to be James and his young demo, Margaret, but there seemed to be some difficulty in cueing up the music and so we skipped on to…

• The Belly Dancers… This was the belly dance teacher and maybe about 20 of the people who had done the belly dance class doing a prepared routine. Unusually, it wasn’t to your typical belly dance music, but to Michael Buble’s Feeling Good… Yep, the same music used for the blues routine I’ll be doing at the BFG (I expect) in a couple of week’s time.

  (Interesting side note… Someone asked me to dance to this, maybe on Friday night, but asked in a very hesitant manner, because it was quite slow and she wasn’t sure I’d be up for it. I was well up for it. Because I’m so familiar with the music and its phrasing and timing and such, it makes it so much more fun when I can do some more interesting things when I’m dancing to it.)

  Quite a good performance, though watching from the front, I don’t think I got the best angle…

• Next I think were Keith and Janey – they had quite an impressive routine worked out, but it wasn’t very presentational. In particular I think they could have used the space on the floor better. Still, much better than I could have done.

• John & Hazel seemed to be more experienced at “showcase” routines (or perhaps they just had more time to work on it.) They’re both great dancers and I was particularly impressed by some of the drops in their show.

• Sometime between these routines we got two dances from J&M – once their music was working! And, of course, they were very good. They really know how to put on a show.

• Last up, but in many ways the most impressive, were the Superheros team that won at Blackpool back at the start of March. It was excellent then – and it was even better the second time around.

The rest of the night night was good, regular freestyle dancing. I danced all the way to the end of the night at 2am, though I was beginning to flag a bit by about half 1.

Some lovely dances, lots of good music, though I probably preferred Friday night – maybe because the music was more familiar to me and I was less tired.

Was tucked up in bed for about half 2 – another busy day ahead of me…

Woke up quite late, but managed to get breakfast and be down ready for the first workshop (half an hour later than on Saturday) just in time…

On Sunday I decided I’d try some of the “alternative” workshops, rather than just sticking with MJ & WCS… In fact, I chose to do some MJ over “expressive solo dancing”, as that just sounded like a good way to embarrass yourself. But given the choice between WCS and a body language lecture, I decided to learn how to read bodies… Then there was a choice between Salsa and Boogie-Woogie. As I’d already done some Salsa before, I decided to try a little bit of boogie…

So, let’s go through the workshops…

• Spinning and Centring I don’t really need to hear the same stuff once again about how to spin – balance, spotting, all that sort of thing, but it was still fun practicing a wee spinny routine, including at the end a cool wee spinning drop thing. It’s hard to explain it, even harder to explain how it works… Let’s have a go. We start having spun the girl in ACW, so she’s half-nelsoned (her R behind her to your R) and her left on your shoulder. Put L on her upper R arm and at the same time as letting go R-R, and bringing your R up to her shoulder-blade, you tip her to your L by taking a small step to the side. She will dip – you support her with your R, but you want to turn her under your R arm, bringing her back up from under it, turning your hand and arm as necessary. This can then go into a another dip/spin or a simple dip or drop.

  Again though, I think I’d have done better in this class with a fixed partner. The dip spin thing requires the lady to duck under my arm – if she’s much taller than me it makes things much harder…

• Body Language Interesting stuff. Talking about acting/motivations and “tells”, in particular how you can leak stress clues from your hands and feet, and how eye movement can also tell you what’s going on inside someone’s head.

  Nice demo of number guessing just be reading how someone says “no”, and guessing a word simply by watching them say it “in their head” repetitively.

• Boogie-Woogie We had a brief intro to this fun swing dance from L&B… It’s got the same triple-step footwork as WCS, and presumably Lindy… In fact, based on this wee intro, I’ve got to ask… how does Boogie-Woogie differ from Lindy Hop? It’s got the same 6- & 8-beat steps. Similar moves. Is the difference just in timing, attitude, these kinds of things?

  Quite good fun, though a bit tricky to keep up as it gets fast!!

After we came back from a nice lunch in the centre of Perth, I watched a bit of the Advanced MJ and the final WCS class. I had decided earlier that I would be leaving Perth a little early. There were delays due to engineering works on the trains, and I had wanted to see if I could get to the Tea Dance that was being help at the GUU. I didn’t really fancy any of the stuff in the Sunday afternoon timetable in Perth anyway…

The WCS was too advanced for me, and I didn’t fancy doing the “Advanced MJ” without a fixed partner. After that was a “fun class” with James, which I’m sure was lots of fun, but having now seen the video clip, I don’t mind missing it so much…

So, I away, heading back to Glasgow via Fife and the Forth Rail Bridge, but making it to Glasgow and the GUU for not long past 5 o’clock. I was disappointed that some of my favourite dancers I’d hoped would be there weren’t, but there were still enough folks to make it a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, dancing, chatting and eating cakes.

Looking forward to the next one…

So, just a couple of things left to do…

First I want to thank absolutely everyone who made the weekend in Perth such a good one. I had a brilliant time and would thoroughly recommend these weekenders to all dancers.

Special thanks to Lindsay and her team, all the teachers, the DJs and the cabaret performers.

And a big thanks to those lady dancers who made each dance with them into a dream. Looking forward to the next time…

OK, the last thing is specific feedback about things I haven’t covered above… You might want to stop reading here if you want to avoid a bit of negativity. Let me say again, over the weekend I had a great time, but that doesn’t mean that some things couldn’t have been better…

A word or two about the hotel and room… I was basically happy with the accommodation, though it shows it age a bit. Some floors slope or are uneven and hot water wasn’t always available. The dance floors could also have done with a bit of work on them – they weren’t very smooth, with bits that had been replaced a bit higher than the rest of the floor. Not the fastest floor I’ve ever danced on, though I did find that the floor in the main ballroom got faster between Friday and Saturday nights in places – was someone talcing it? Certainly better than the floor we had in Pitlochry anyway.

There were notices around apologising for the inconvenience as a result of improvements being made to the hotel, though I couldn’t see any evidence of that…

Food was pretty good, though not much choice and not very inspiring. Breakfast buffet “English Breakfast” wasn’t always very hot, and for the price they normally charge (according to the hotel guide) I’d have expected a whole lot better.

The service was mostly good, though it was a little hap-hazard in the restaurant depending on the waiter you got…

There were a couple of things I might have done differently in the organisation… I’d liked to have seen longer descriptions of what to expect in each class in the programme and a demo of the routine about to be taught at the start of each session. I’d also have liked a greater variation from the dances that were presented last year. For example, if the next Dance Fever in October has classes on, e.g., Tango, it would interest me a lot more than just another chance to try some cha-cha, mambo and salsa…

And that’s me said everything I wanted to say… If you were there I hope you had as good a time as me – or even better. And if you weren’t there – why not?

Cheers!