🏷️ dance

My newest dance teacher can dance fluidly in any pair of boots at insanely cold temperatures on treacherous amounts of snow and ice in front of City Hall smack in the middle of the legendary Buffalo winter.



Can yours?!

We learnt a 30s routine in around a hour this past Monday and had too much fun doing it. Half my office and extended office contacts made up around 85% of the class. To what end, you ask?

We hope to be able to star in Missy Elliot's latest video and replace the Japanese blokes in around a year.



Watch out. The 345-BMR-Bloc* is learning some serious Hip-Hop!

---

NB: That's our kewl office nick if you didn't guess already.

I just realized that I have been tagging all my yoga posts as "dance". That was because I started doing regular guided yoga to get better at salsa. My categorizing OCD kicked in recently and I wanted to re-label everything as "yoga" or maybe "fitness". But it's too late.

The yoga classes have somehow evolved into sessions of extreme performance art and creative mental dance. Yesterday, for instance, we tried to become one with the sinuous forms of this exotic looking flower called the bird of paradise...


Too bad, none of us ended up quite like this bloke:


Even secretly-super-yogi-power-e:Paul. HEHEHE


But I maintain that I could have totally done it if I were at that crazyawesome beach in the background. You shouldn't believe anyone if they tell you that it depends on the extreme flexibility of hip joints and core balance. It's so obvious that you need to be at the beach.

Oooh, there is more. Erin also demonstrated to everyone how to stand on our heads.


This time everyone in the class ended up like this.


Except me. I was stuck in Figure 31 for an eternity...


before this rather unfortunate image made its way into my head: "And yet you incessantly stand on your head - Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

I wimpily decided it probably wasn't, at that particular time and gave up.

But hey, all was not lost. I was able to do the exclusive "Erin-asana" - an inspired soulful yogasana conceptualized and breathed into life by the one and only Erin at Hand to Heart. It's so exclusive, I can't even find a google image!

After class, Paul and I got a bottle of vodka (if you are thinking that it was probably to drown our mediocre birds of paradise hell, you would be wrong), had some delicious sautééd mango in sauce, crispy noodles, sushi and rice delicacies at Blue Fin (arguably the best Asian fusion restaurant on Elmwood Avenue), bitched about tech stuff, got some smashing groceries, including an out-of-this-planet olive bread, talked conspiracy theories and discussed housing markets, in that order. If you had not been at some crowded beer club, you could have enjoyed the Yogi's choicest...

Too late. It's time to honour your practice now. Or come to another adventure with us next week! :-)

Fewer words strike more terror into the hearts of aspiring yogis than when the teacher casually tosses out the term "yogi's choice". What it essentially means is that you could choose to stay on in a wimpy form of the pose while the rest of the class and the teacher go into the more exotic variation - that just might have given you an infinitely more effective muscle stretch had you been able to do it. The harder you try and reach that variation, the more likely you are to wobble out of balance and end up with no pose at all. At which point you "honour your practice", which is actually just code for accepting that you totally missed the yoga elixir that was dangled before you minutes back.

Yoga totally whipped all of our hands and hearts yesterday... well, all EXCEPT @paul who was probably born with a strong dose of yogi's-choice-power-goo in his silver-yogi-spoon. I meant to complete this entry after class but I was so washed out after practice that I fell asleep at my "desk" and pretty much crawled into bed 3 metres away.

@paul, on the other hand has been logged in the entire time and quite possibly coding in a frenzy. That's what happens when you outshine the entire class in just about every outlandish balance-act yoga-pose that is thrown your way. And there were tons that I can't even find the names for.


For instance, the L-pose at the wall above with a "yogi's choice" extreme T-variation where you raise one of your legs up in the air till it's perfectly perpendicular to your other leg and parallel to your arms. While the rest of the class wobbled with asymmetry across the studio, @paul literally flew through several of the poses AND he did the T-variation on both sides.

Wait. There is more. Later after class, while I bemoaned the lack of moonwalk fluidity, he totally denied knowing how to moonwalk WHILE his legs were moonwalking the hell out of the yoga studio floor. If all this doesn't silently scream "Clark Kent!!" to you... well, then it's time to go and see the movies or you could come to yoga. Your Yogi's choice.

At the Texas Salsa Congress!!

Too bad I can't be there to drool over their performance...

After an insane amount of clapping-along to a zillion songs, I think I finally have it.


So in this video the rhythm is a 3-2, Pa Pa Pa Pa-Pa clave.

1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 6 & 7 & 8 &.
Pa & 2 Pa 3 & Pa & 5 & Pa & Pa & 8 &

Most of the times, the clave itself is just not discernible. I was trying very hard to listen for individual instruments and their phrasing to discern the clave. I think, in the process, I just stopped hearing the music.

The easiest way is to close your eyes and feel where the music undulates and then snaps back and then repeats this cycle over and over again. The undulation is the three slower-paced beats (Pa Pa Pa) and the snapping back is the quick two beats Pa-Pa. I wonder if Sarah and Sean are listening for this pattern when they dance. It is still hard for me to tell what techniques people are using to decide when to take that first step in any style.

Get real. When you are the ONLY one flopped in a totally unseemly heap on your mat, while a class of accomplished gymnasts is gracefully twisting into the epic urdhva dhanurasana (or the upright bow) all around you...

(including 1st-time-yogis-by-self-admission such as @paul and @terry), you have to admit, it starts to feel like someone gave you the ticket to the Olympics but you accidentally ended up in the competition ring instead of chilling out as a spectator on the stands with buttered and oh-so-salty popcorn. That was, in a nutshell, yoga class today.

But like any regulated sports event, you get detected as a fake very soon and ejected from the ring. Thankfully, I didn't get thrown out of class for ungracefulness but instead, took a massive skid on ice and lacerated my right knee (on the top of a bruise from smashing into a wall on Monday) as I walked back from Pricerite. On the bright side of this minor discomfort, all desire to master the dhanurasana TODAY has been bled out very effectively. I am back to eating massive amounts of chocolate hazelnut butter from my second 1lb bottle - this time blended with yogurt and mixed with frozen blueberries.

It could have been worse though. I could have slipped on ice and impaled my head on a cast-iron fence on the corner of Oakland and Bryant if @paul and @terry had not stabilized me in time.

The moral of this tale is almost every second person you see on the street or anywhere really, has had a secret gymnastic past and if you stalked them enough you might also find that they dance the salsa infinitely better than you ever can or will. The trick is to find opportune times to take mighty spills on the pavement and split your knee wide open so that you couldn't care less about your complete lack of skills at transforming yourself into an inverted ancient weapon or doing superawesomecrazy shines at salsa congresses.

I tried around 12 times to do a baby freeze on my left side. Here's a breakdown statistic of the results:

• Crash-landed on my head - (2)
• Crash-landed on my left hip - (2)
• Flopped around like a dying fish - (3)
• Leaned too far and felt my elbows give way under me - (2)
• Stopped and stared at the floor in disgust for 10 seconds - (1)
• Acquired a nasty 5-minute-cramp on my left upper arm - (1)
• Acquired a bruise on my left temple - (1)

It's impossible. My body just doesn't want to rotate on my right forearm and my left elbow just doesn't stay put on my left waist and slips off the minute I try to stabilize it.

On the other hand, baby-freezing to my right is a happier state of affairs. I managed to stretch the time I could hold the freeze to a whole 30 seconds today. And so I celebrated with another 1/4 lb of Justin's Chocolate Hazelnut Butter. I am dangerously close to a nut butter overload and opening the 2nd bottle. Thankfully, the 3rd bottle belongs to @paul.

Verve Studio is starting up some really interesting classes in March including a hip hop class with Micheal Burton, a popping class and a hatha yoga class with T. J. Veith in addition to the breakdancing classes with Shane "Depree" Fry.

I am pretty interested in taking the hip hop with Michael Burton because I really want to incorporate some hip hop flavour to my stick-like salsa.

The current schedule is for Thursdays. They need 3 more people to offer a class on Mondays... Who's up for hip-hopping with me?

in breakdancing class with Shane "b-boy Depree" Fry today.



I was in suspended animation floating in an orbit around Uranus. That, and I have somewhat sore elbows.

First there was the Cuban on1
Then there was the NYC on2
And now, there is the one and only Buffalo onPMT...