Another dancing video. Balboa rocks!

Hello all,

I’ve been busy with dancing again, so my apologies for the complete lack of ANY sewing related posts. Normal transmissions will resume… soonish-ish… :0)

In the meantime though, my dance partner John and I were asked to give a Balboa demonstration at a tango night last weekend. Pretty intimidating stuff as we found – and were also warned – that the tango crowd are very dance educated… so we knew they’d be watching closely.

Also, quite a few of our moves are… ahem… borrowed from tango to start with so the thought of perhaps badly executing a move that they would already be familiar with was a little nerve wracking.

There were a couple of stumbles, missed connections and less than smooth transitions… but the footage looks pretty good – plus the crowd went nuts at the end and we were dragged back for an encore so I guess they liked it! They were very quiet during the dance which was a little disconcerting as swing crowds are usually very encouraging and clap along with the music and yahoo and woo when they see something they like… but like I said, it was all applause at the end so all good.

I’m always my own worst critic so I won’t mention any specific parts I’m unhappy with and will just say I’m grateful for the opportunity, for not falling on my butt, having a reason to do more practice and having yet another excuse to wear that same skirt! It seemed to get almost as many compliments as it did at the Brisbane competition… and that’s saying something coming from the tango crowd who prefer their outfits a little more slinky than preppy cute… and no, I still haven’t fixed the catches on the skirt waistband. Bad me!!

One thing that I did note that people mentioned again and again was how much FUN they thought our dance was. I suppose when you compare it to tango it is a lot less… intense… and our music tends to be upbeat and bouncy… which again, is quite different to tango music.

Now, no more chit chat – here’s the video.