Current mood:	pleased
Current music:	Title: For Once In My Life * Artist: Michael Bublé

Creating Connection
Practice tonight was good.

We began with tango, but couldn't make our frame feel right. For some reason, Steve was having trouble making his arms feel comfortable and felt generally off balance. He didn't care to work through this, for whatever reason, and I was happy to let go of working on standard for the day as my stress level lately has caused my shoulders to creep up close to my ears, so even if my position had been correct, it felt odd and awkward and strained. Despite this, we got a bit of work done on the tango, figured out some about moving properly (that is, from our centers instead of our tops or feet) and I was able to explain a bit more about what makes me feel strained and twisted in our contra check. Steve was in a listening mood, somehow, and I was in a work hard and accomplish something but not bitchy mood. Which is recent, but good.

I am learning, with dance, to realize that it has to be about enjoying it and about taking pride in what you bring to the floor. Recognizing that you have a lot to learn, but trusting what you have and taking pride in that. Because unfortunately, not everyone can be in the final or win first place. And someday, we'll end up forced to dance championship level, and as good as we might be, we won't be as good as the top six couples, or even the top 12, really. And at that point, we have to keep working and keep doing our best not for the competitions and the results, but because it makes us as dancers feel good about ourselves, our work and our dancing. And dancing, when it works, is the most amazing feeling in the world.

The best part of practice, however, was working on Latin. We had enough success with it at the last competition that Steve believes we have some potential, and our standard coach (who had been judging at the last competition) said that our Latin had no connection. Steve told me this, and I laughed saying, well, yes... I took it away so you would stop leading me with your arms and overleading in general. Now we need to put it back.

And so we spent nearly an hour working on connection and basics. And the little bit of that that we did made our chacha routine, when we did it to speed, better. It's a long road we're starting on now -- we have a lot of work to do disciplining ourselves to move and settle and move and settle, but we are, I believe going about building connection the right way. I know that often people are taught to lead and be led with their arms, and while it's quite possible to dance this way, our choreography is too involved and too fast to work with this approach. Plus there will be synergy in the two; our biggest weakness in standard is even more profound in Latin -- proper connection requires a great awareness of center and moving from one's center first, and since most of the time there are few points of contact, both partners have to be very in touch with where their centers are. Standard has lots of points of contact, so while the technique is harder to fake, it's very easy to move from the wrong place and still have smooth lead and follow. So as we develop a good balanced center in our Standard, our Latin will improve, and as we work on connection in our latin, our sense of center will improve which will help the Standard.

Good feelings about the partnership and where it's going. This is a very nice change from the past few months where I have been feeling very negative about my and our dancing. I think some forced time off has helped, but more than anything, realizing a few weeks ago that somehow my sense of self-worth got tied in to my competition results and then saying 'well, that's very silly' has helped most. And competing with no expectations because there had been little practice time and my mom had died only a few days before the comp helped, too. Because we went out and sold what we had, and it turned out pretty well, really. It was nice to have dancing that felt good and much improved from the past be rewarded, because it reminds you that the hard work is all worth it. But even if it hadn't been, the dancing felt good and I felt improvement and I was happy with how the rounds went (generally. Being dropped in Samba wasn't exactly *fun* but ah well, there's no such thing as a perfect comp), and that mattered a lot more than the results. Which truly is the best way to dance.