So on tonight’s dance classes menu was contemporary and latin ( a two hour half/half classes of Bachata and Salsa).
I’ve already talked about Salsa recently in my last post, so tonight I’m reflecting more on the contemporary class…it was good! I was pretty tired so by no means was it my best dancing ever, but I felt good in my body and had a good level of body awareness during class (I really think the yoga I’ve been doing lately has been helping me greatly in so many ways - including this heightened awareness of body during stillness and movement).
It’s an open class (at Pivot Studio, in Newcastle) so the experience and skill levels are fairly varied, but everyone just works where they are at, and the teacher (Janice) will give feedback accordingly. I’m really enjoying the piece we’ve been working on the past couple of weeks as it has a good combination of fast and slow movements; standing and floor work; technical versus emotive actions…it’s one of those dances where you can connect your body and feeling through the music…had you ever had that experience when sometimes you don’t connect as much with a piece and it starts to feel like you are just doing moves rather than really dancing; or if you aren’t being pushed you get a little complacent and “disconnect” so to speak or don’t challenge yourself to reach your potential?
Well the fact that this dance did stir something up in me made me reflect on these circumstance and gave me the idea to speak to one of my friends I dance with. We’ve had a few discussions and both know that sometimes it can become easy to get in a rut and stay at one level when you’re in a class of people less experienced than yourself, because you can manage to look proficient and pull out nice lines and quality of movement without a great deal of effort. We’ve also both agreed that is not what we want for ourselves - I still want to develop myself so much more and so does she.
We both have said that when we started dancing together in classes it had a positive impact due to the healthy competitive spirit it awoke it us - all of a sudden we had someone else to benchmark against - someone to observe and learn from - someone we didn’t want to outdo us too much! Fortunately in our case the competition has had a positive affect - because we’ve chosen to feel inspired and encouraged by each other, rather than threatened or disheartened. Have you ever stopped to think how you react to having “competition” in your classes?
Anyway, so I asked my friend last week to let me know whenever she has feedback or constructive suggestions for me, and she said the same back…I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it as I think it will be great to have an outside eye with different thoughts, beliefs and background circumstances and education to enrich who I am as a dancer - kind of like how you develop exponentially when you are exposed to multiple different teachers of the same style .
There are also some other potentially exciting developments in the pipeline for my friend and I…but too early to discuss now.
In the meantime, three cheers for embracing some friendly competition, but always keep in mind that even though if you taking your dancing seriously at a competitive, semi-professional or professional level you’re going to be pitted against or compared with others day-in-day-out, you’re ultimately competing against yourself…forever working on improving yourself!
Tags: contemporary dance, contemporary dance classes, contemporary dancers, semi-professional dancers