Dancing with Blanca

Blanca’s visit here is nearly over.  I miss her already. She so turns out to be what I imagined. Fun to be with, beautiful, spontaneous and wholehearted in her enjoyment of things, sensitive, sweet – and a powerful dancer even when not doing a whole performance. Even when she’s showing me a move or two, she acquires a presence that’s hard to describe. I can just say that it goes beyond the everyday person.

During her visit here, we’ve managed to squeeze in a few classes. First thing I can’t get over is her total endorsement of the work I’ve been putting in these past few years. I’ve never really sought an opinion from anyone who knows (except for one little clip of me doing a camel) and I haven’t put up any videos. I kind of don’t like them. So I haven’t really known for sure whether my basics are sound or full of bad dance habits, whether my learning of choreographies has any substance or is it just loosely following the moves, and whether I have any grace at all. Incredibly, she says she’s fairly impressed and that the hard work I’ve been doing shows. I can’t say just how good that feels!

We started by my showing her two choreographies. Jillina’s drum solo. She watched it through and then helped make some corrections. For instance, I am lowering my heel a bit when I do a big hip drop. She said to keep it up for better isolation. There are some points in that choreography that I don’t do well but that is just a sheer matter of drilling – I haven’t worked on it yet. For instance, there’s layering stomach pops on a hip shimmy. Sorry. I just haven’t worked on it.

I also danced Blanca’s own choreography for her. She liked it very much and said it sat very well on me. She thinks I should make a video clip of it.

Blanca feels that teaching is totally the best way to learn so she felt she should give me classes on how to teach. But I kept wanting to learn more chiftitelli moves instead. J I’m not sure I’ll be teaching much because you need a lot of time that a hobbyist like me may not have. Getting a studio, organizing material, keeping classes up all the time – I don’t think I’m up to it. I’d have to give up my job!

So we ended up doing some chifttelli combinations. We followed a nice format of me starting something – which means it’s a move coming to me naturally – and then she would add to it and make it a little combination. That’s what I wanted – lots of little combinations to play with. I do like to have an occasional shot at improvising to chiftitelli, so I was grateful to her for showing me how to work out combinations.

We also did a bit of the material from her drum solo workshop. We haven’t taken pictures dancing… but should.

This was so much fun. I’m also thrilled that I now own some of the hip scarves from the DVDs… because in addition to everything else, Blanca is so generous.