Revision Time!
We’ve been revising Feeling Good this weekend…
Steve & Melanie have run their “Feeling Good” workshops over the space of one weekend on Glasgow. My partner and I got to go along for a bit of revision.
This time it was done as two sessions over two days, while we had 4 two-hour sessions. So, the first day covered more-or-less what we learnt in our first two lessons – plus a wee bit of the second half as less time was wasted on revision.
The first half of the routine we’ve pretty much got. It follows that it’s the bit that we’ve done the most. For that reason the first day was always going to be easy going…
Although my partner came all the way down from Aberdeen and arrived on time, I had difficulty getting myself ready and so missed the first two-hour session. I don’t think I missed much as I was able to dance the whole of that part of the routine first time without any extra coaching from my partner who’d been following along on her own in my absence.
There’s still some work to be done on timing to get it all together, but I’m happy where we are at the moment..
It’ll be interesting to see how the second day goes…
The second day was always going to be tougher. First, because we always more confident with the first half that with the second… And secondly, because we’d been dancing in Edinburgh until 1am, and didn’t get home and off to bed until around 3am.
The venue today was the GUU – much closer to my home, and also interesting as that it where we’ll be performing in two weeks’ time. We also got three more couples from the original Dundee workshops joining us for a revision.
I was surprised at how much we remembered, though I probably shouldn’t have been. We did learn the routine pretty well back in February, so there really wasn’t anything new, plus the revision we had up in Aberdeen a couple of weeks ago meant that it would all be fairly fresh in our minds.
That said, we had a lot more time to pick up details to make some of the moves easier or better. I now feel much more confident in my ability to perform the routine and not screw up. For example, there’s a bit with three whips in a row – a small tip led to me changing the way I do these moves entirely and it made such a difference both to my ability to do them properly and on time, plus to how my partner felt about my lead.
We spent almost the whole of the last hour just going through the complete routine again and again, giving it a bit of polish, and working on our timing, but even before that I was really impressed by how well the folks who had just learnt it all this weekend were doing. During one of the rest-breaks I got a chance to watch maybe half-a-dozen of the couples going through most of the routine, and I was really impressed. It looked really good.
I was very pleased by my partner’s and my performance – I think we worked really well together, getting each other to keep us right in bits we were prone to make mistakes in. I don’t know if there was anybody else in the room I would have worked as well with.
Although I don’t expect anyone gave an entirely flawless performance, by the end of the session I don’t think a casual observer would have noticed any glaring errors from us. I couldn’t have said the same thing back in February at the end of the series of workshops when we first learn it. Not saying we were better than anyone else though – you don’t get much of a chance to watch how other folks are doing, but I’m sure we were all around the same standard by the end of the day.
So, BIG, BIG thanks to my partner. Thanks for your enthusiasm, support, and trust you give me. It has always been a pleasure dancing with you and this weekend was no different.
Thanks to our teachers, Steve and Melanie. And cheers to all the other folks taking part. Thanks for your help, tips and encouragement.
There’ll be more rehearsals before we actually perform it in a couple of week’s time. Looking forward to it all.