Long overdue fire!

Oh wow, time flies when life gets in the way.

My dancing of pretty much all sorts has been on hold over the summer, but I neglected to post the video of the fire dance course I attended! So here's some footage of that one time (so far) that I've tried dancing with Fire fans and hand torches.

Kids, don't try this at home. Out of 5 lessons at 2 hour each, we spent the entire first 3 times learning about fire safety, the importance of having and being a watchful fire guard when someone's performing, drilling emergency fire extinguishing, and learning what type of clothes not to wear unless you want to have polyester scars melted into your skin permanently (ow!!!) o_0 Apparently, the most protective type of apparel for fire performances is leather, which probably accounts for the badass image the art has ;)


Mind you, it's pretty scary to dance with fans, because the heat from them is multiplied and the torches make lightsaber-like noises when passed rapidly through air...

Show!

Feeling proud, humbled and grateful to be part of an awesome dance group :). These are the excellent ladies who I've been having fun with and who have pushed and challenged me all this term. I'm really, really looking forward to keeping on with this together with them!

Here's our collectively choreographed dance to "Conquest of Spaces", performed at World Dance Company's end-of-term show. It's preceded by a gorgeously melancholy solo by our teacher Helene (who is part of the group choreo too). With luck I'll have managed to start the embedded clip where our group starts dancing, if not, we start at 3min 47s... but the whole thing is worth a watch as a whole. :)




I think we did pretty good considering that the choreography was completed 5 days before the show... ;)

Next week's adventure: I'm going to try a summer course in fire dance (which is essentially what we do here... but with FIRE.) Burrrrn...

Viking break

There's been a bit of a lull in my dance project, for a number of reasons; one is that I'm working on some long-term challenges that have come from my group of belly dance friends, who have called me out on relying too much on improv and that perhaps I should actually dance to music rather than sticking it on afterwards... ;) And that it would probably be a bigger challenge for me to actually choreograph something instead of improvising. Point taken, so I'm working on that.

But the more major reason for the lull is that I was preparing for the race Tough Viking Göteborg on the 26th of April, which was a fantastic experience both as being my first race and as a physical challenge. It included 20 obstacles (mud! ice baths! barbed wire! tunnels! ramps! electric shocks! climbing! fire!) over a stretch of 7.5 km of mixed terrain trails and park paths, which felt right for me - lots of energy spurts and focus needed to clear the obstacles, and (the dealbreaker for me) not so much running. IT WAS AWESOME! I was super excited the days before and quite some time after. :)


Our excellent 5-person team from work, TFANK! (short for the courteous motto in swedish "Thanks for coming!", which we directed at everyone running the race) chose to stick together for as long as we could, although towards the end we separated into our preferred respective running paces - still, in the end, we all made it within 20 minutes of each other! Really good considering our different levels of physical fitness and that one of our members joined with 4 days notice to replace an injured original member, who resorted to becoming our designated photographer. She was chasing us around the park on a bike in a manner most impressive :)

The excellent Team TFANK! sporting our medals after completing the race

Actually, the parts that were hardest for me mentally were the flat park-path asphalt stretches... without the extra oomph of needing to climb/swim/crawl/be mindful of my footing, I tended to lose steam... which one of my dear teammates tried to coax out of me by coaching me (mid-race) to never resort to walking, but keep running even if it's ever so slowly. (Said teammate was running in circles around me while delivering this message, which brought to mind a mildly annoying yet encouraging golden retriever who you can't dislike because he means well ;). I kind of failed at following his advice then and there so after a while he ran ahead of me, but at least my mental running challenge for the long term is clear. ;)

I intended this a s a one-off, but now many of my teammates are planning to run "Toughest" in October, which is a similar race with double the number of obstacles, presumably over a running stretch that is twice as long. I'm both tempted to join and not, mostly because of the running... we'll see. :) 

As for preparations, I'm not much for margins, so approximately one week before the race I ran my very first mile (as in 10k, for you imperial-system people)! That's the longest I've ever run, so for me it was a big deal, but it was equally a great boost because I ran with a friend for the first time in my life (thanks Ila!)... although we agreed on a no-talking policy, because neither of us is famous for our running stamina ;). Still, we were pretty proud of ourselves. :)

So that was a really fun and fulfilling experience - and not too bad pain-wise afterwards, to my great surprise.

For maximum contrast, the next adventure in physical exertions coming up is... a belly dance performance this coming weekend, complete with group choreography and costume (which I finished sewing last night). Don't put all your eggs in one basket... :) 

Travel issue(s)

Sometimes my lifestyle, which often has me travelling, isn't really conducive to keeping up a routine or a training regime... But as we say in swedish: Shame on those who give up! So even if I spent all of this past week travelling between Höör, Lund ans Uppsala, and didn't succeed with posting something for last weekend, I still managed - rather spontaneously, as you can judge by my running workout attire (!) - to do an improv today when I was in Uppsala. And this one is a bit unusual, since it takes place outdoors, on a bird-watching platform overlooking the Fyrisån river (or actually it's smaller than a river, but hey). I know, I know, I'm VERY bundled up for a belly dance performance. I'll admit that the belly movements are probably the least visible thing about this dance... But bear with me, it was 3°C that morning... :P



So this week's attempt was also done without music, because I couldn't use my phone both as a camera and a music player at the same time - that'll explain my dangling headphones ;) But I'm beginning to feel pretty confident about my ability to keep time, because once again I found a song that coincidentally matches my movements pretty well! I'm slways a bit sad when using this method that I'm not able to accentuate particular things happening in the music, but weirdly enough, some of the stuff I do seems to fit hand-in-love with other details (it's just a matter of sliding around the soundtrack until the beats hit something distinct ;)

On a side note - those who know me might be in a state of shock that I've taken up running, since I've spent most of my life expressing vehement hatred towards running... But as late as a year ago I discovered that I have been running with incorrect technique (too fast & too big strides, which burned me out fast), so when I discovered how to pace myself, it became fascinating to see how far I could go without stopping. But that's just a side note to the testament that I'm crazy enough to have signed up for an obstacle course race with some colleagues at the end of April (!!!).

It will be either the death of me, or one hell of a fika story ;)

Third week

Woo, third week now that I'm working on my dancing :)! Today's practice was extra nice because I had company. I was joined by my former ballet friend Clara, who's owned a pair of tap shoes for, say, two weeks? But she's super musical, has danced ballet for decades and understands rhythm, so we had a really enjoyable catch-up and beginner technique-class-slash-improv session. :) We did that for about an hour before she left me to my devices (literally, as in the video camera). 

So for this week's tap improv I got it into my head that I needed to work more on lightness, since my style is normally kind of heavy. So off I went... and I'm not sure I succeeded at keeping it light all the time (perhaps a song including elephant references was a very poor choice), but even with lapses and all I think there's a noticeable difference in "tone" between this and my last videos. For some reason, my speed picked up quite a bit in some steps... not always for the better.  ;)

There are some mess-ups in there, as my facial expression reveals, and that silly stern face seems to still be plaguing me. Maybe I should stop listening to music featuring vocals by grumpy men?

I took a break for some non-tap dancing this time too, but unfortunately my phone died so I had no music... Just as an experiment, I tried freestyle dancing in silence, imagining a Haim song ("Go Slow") for a bit of tribal fusion (=belly dance) improv. It's actually my first belly dance improv ever on tape, so be kind... Granted, it was a bit spontaneous so I didn't bother with adjusting my attire to something more belly dance-appropriate. I'm not sure I can stomach that yet (hurr hurr) ;P
But when I got home and started editing I happened upon an entirely different song (thanks to a random playlist) that fit the moves uncannily well, so this is how that turned out:


Not good, not bad, but  I'm kind of pleased that I've gotten over my mental hurdle of recording a tribal improv - of all the dances I've tried in life, it's one of the ones that I'm least confident about, even if it's meant to be done with assurance. It makes me feel a little more self-conscious than usual. I don't know if it's because I started learning it after 30, but I hope I get better at it, because it's also one of the most fun, intricate and musical dance forms I've tried, plus you get to discover muscles in your stomach you never knew you had! Maybe there'll be more of that in the future if I feel brave enough... no promises. :)

More dance! And a sterrrn face.

Sometimes things go easier than expected - I wasn't expecting to feel quite so enthusiastic after posting my first tap improv video, but it got me really motivated to improve (and some friends gave me encouraging feedback, thanks guys! :) so I ended up back in the cellar a week later, again with the camera, and successfully recorded more improv dancing!

This particular session got interesting, because I'd been watching a lot of hiphop dance videos from Urban Dance Camp prior to it and felt a bit inspired and nostalgic (hiphop is one of the things I took classes in as a teen).
As promised, here's the Dr. Dre song (which my tap crew and I use for warm-up). I got a good laugh at my fantastically stern hiphop-face that I was completely unaware that I had... bahaha, so G ;) This is why video is a powerful teacher.

But what was more interesting was that in between tap takes - where I honestly wasn't feeling so free in my movements - I decided to goof off with some hiphop improv too. And honestly, I kind of like the hiphop better - my tap shoes are super slippery, so I feel kind of limited with throwing my weight around too much (falling with metal-soled shoes somehow feels more dangerous than other ways of being shod). So it was a relief, and quite liberating, to feel some traction in my sneakers, and just concentrate on the dancing and expression - even if I was worried that I'd forgotten how to do it. I had been a bit worried that my body wouldn't have the stamina I had when I danced hiphop last, about 12+ years ago... Keeping up the energy for a whole song is actually pretty strenuous. But it worked, and something that makes me glad is that I see that I've been influenced by these last few years of tribal fusion belly dancing, it's done wonders for my 'lyrical' and 'popping' :) I see things that I want to improve here too, but performance-wise, I'm obviously happier! ;)


I think it shows in my face, too.

Voilá, some tap improv!

For various reasons, here's a video of me doing some improvised tap-dancing in a cellar at the university I work at. It's not perfect, sometimes it's not super interesting, and I was sweaty and near the end of my stamina... but it's a fair idea of how I do improv as of now.

I've been inspired to do this by Anna, a very cool dance friend of mine, who just finished a year-long project where she recorded herself once a week doing belly-dance improvisation, in order to learn, become more aware of her movement vocab, to mess up and survive anyway, and (in my opinion) just be generally badass.

I'm not sure I can make once a week fly, but I'm going to start using video to start looking at and hopefully improving my dancing (in whatever form feels right for the moment, I have a few to choose from ;) and figure out what's working and what I can/want to do differently.

Tap has been in my life for 21 years (yikes I'm ancient!) and I still love it, especially improv. Although I have fallen off the practice wagon royally the past few years, with months in between practices :P... But every little now and again when I practice, I think "Ah, not bad, still got it! (...  ...  ...) Aaaah eff, now what the h*** was that! Blech.".

Inner monologues aside, I had fun messing around but I see a ton of things I want to work on already... Which is strangely motivating. :)

So here y'all: Lousy camera angle, some sloppy moments and a face that is only sometimes in "performance mode". And the sound of the "drumming" in my head just baaaarely getting translated into footwork.

(Next time, I'll probably do a Dr. Dre song :)





tap improv, mar 10th from clickfoot on Vimeo.