taught salsa dancing

I taught salsa a couple of weeks ago. Here was the announcement:

"""Andrew will teach the basics of L.A.-style salsa. Also called line-style salsa because of how the dancers change position it has a different feel than Cuban-style salsa. Both styles are danced in Gothenburg.

The timing in salsa is a bit tricky because of the pauses on beats 4 and 8 so the lesson will start with the basic step and following the beat in the music. After that will be the underarm turn and the cross-body lead, along with advice on how the lead works and the reason why it's called "line-style" salsa.

"Cuban motion" adds an extra flare to salsa dancing by making the hips move. Andrew will introduce cuban motion through merengue, another latin dance with a simpler beat than salsa."""


It was 90 minutes of teaching Santa Fe style salsa to a mixture of new beginners and ballroom dancers. Went pretty well. (I use "Santa Fe" style to mean club style, line style, on-1 with a smooth (vs sharp) transition between moves.)

I was nervous at the first. That worked out once I started getting into the teaching. Not much different than other teaching I've done. I would have like to practice before though. When teach programming I have both a lot more experience and often notes about what I'm teaching.

I didn't have the right music. I don't have much salsa music (haven't the room to read from Darin's DVD's) and even the slowest song was too fast to teach. Luckily the club had slower music.

There were a few things I taught out of order. I should have started with an explanation of why it was line style. This was at an engineering school. That did help. I went with a more mechanical explanation of how things worked. Not often I get to say "C2 continuous" - though I know that's wrong. I meant it as a joke. (Really it's more like there's a maximum jerk -- which is the I-kid-you-not scientific term for change in acceleration.)

When I learned to dance several of my teachers talked about "energy" and "grounded" and other things which were hard to interpret. I'm a reductionist; breaking things down and build them back up again. So I tried to teach like that more mechanistic manner.

I mixed teaching styles. I tried to do a bit of the style one of the teachers in South Africa uses, but it's not for me. I mostly stayed with Santiago's style. Even with the circle of women around me. They didn't quite get it, but it was the first time for them.

I teach best as a tutor and not to large groups. What I did was teach and go round to each couple and give pointers. One of the guys was a relative beginner and wanted to do lots of fancy things without having the basics down. After the course, in the open dancing, he wanted me to show him a .. I think it was a CBL inside turn, but that's too simple. Ahh, perhaps I was showing him why he couldn't do a given lead because it was too easily confused with another move, so he wanted to do both.

There are many paths to dance. I personally emphasize the small details first. I think going for the moves makes for bad habits that are hard to break later. It's more than that, I know, and different. Too complicated to explain now.

Hardest was teaching cuban motion. That was the last 10 minutes of the course. I did it with meringue music. Being traditional and all. The thing is, I don't know quite know how to teach it. I remember taking Liz's class focusing on Cuban motion (I do like details) but it was too long ago to remember the details, and I couldn't recall enough from your and Santiago's lessons to teach it.

I also knew it would take a while no matter what so I wasn't worried. I had a lot of lessons focusing on that so instead I only wanted to get across "stepping into a bent leg, which gets straightened" and "shoulders stay still." I prefer dancing with people whose shoulders are not moving up and down.

The ballroom dancers, of course, knew ballroom style Cuban motion. They tried, but habits are habits. Just like I can't do ballroom style motion.

I taught an underarm turn as an arm raise/halo around the head, and emphasized that the lead can start early.
One of the ballroom dancers was having a problem with it because his habit is to do a tick-tock on the lead so he needs to start it later. There too I got to talk about mechanics.

Overall it went well. I got a gift card for two to go to the movies. Anyone want to join me? :)

In the free dancing I tried some waltzing. The first was pretty bad as I tried to remember lessons from earlier this year. It did help having a larger floor than the practice room in Santa Fe. The second try was much better. Still only doing basics and I don't think I attempted the full progression, but enough to fake it.

The woman I danced with is from the local ballroom dance society. She wants me to take lessons from some-teacher-or-other when I'm next here. I'm still of mixed views on ballroom dance (called "standard dance" in Swedish; sorry, "standard dans" in Swedish). It's that poofy formalism. I watched some competitive ballroom dance on the sport channel here. They cover weird sports here. Tall thin guys wearing shirts with the fronts open to the belly button. Not my style.

Plus, there really isn't much chance to dance ballroom socially. OTOH, I do want to reacquire those long missing skills cause you never know when you'll need to dance a Viennese Waltz. More importantly, I want there to be a time in my future when knowing how to a waltz becomes useful.

Though so far that hasn't been the case with my rusting fencing skills. *sigh* Maybe I should practice dancing while wearing a cutlass? Just in case pirates attack during the big ball?

Read a funny joke in Swedish which translates well to English: "Dad? How do you spell 'locomotive'?" "Just like it sounds." "Choo-choo?" See the Language Log entry for the original and details.

den här gången ... på levande svenska!

Åh, det är så roligt att förstör svenska. Jag pratar och skriver "Rinkeby" svenska, eller svengelska. Jag använder syftningar som kommer direkt fran USA. T.ex, rubriken kommer (för mig) fran "Spiderman", en TV-serie som jag tittade omkring 1980. Programmet börjarde med "in living color" däreför att när det ritades (kanske i 1960-talet), då var det nytt och spännande att ha färger.

(Ah, it's so much fun to destroy Swedish [play on words; "förstår svenska" means "to understand Swedish"]. I speak and write "Rinkeby" Swedish [Rinkeby is a part of Stockholm with a high immigrant population who mix Swedish grammar and pronounciation with their original language. I am exaggerating and even wrong as Rinkeby Swedish includes many loan words from eastern Europe and the Middle East and I've been working hard to use proper "verb second" word order .. except in dependent clauses where sentence adverbials come before the verb.] or "svengelska" ["Swenglish", the other way]. I use allusions which come direct from the US. For example, the title [this blog entry is titled "this time .. in living Swedish"] comes (for me) from "Spiderman", a TV cartoon I used to watch around 1980. The show began with "in living color" because when it was drawn (probably in the '60s) it was new and exciting to have color.)

Kursen är slut. Det är bra eftersom minnet har blivit fullt med nya ord och uttryck. Jag behöver tid för att smälta allt och använda dem i samtal. Istället för kursen jobbade jag på AZ i måndags och tisdags. Jag skulle ha jobbat hela veckan men jag har varit en lite sjuk och deprimerad under den sista ungefär 10-12 dagar. Det finns många möjliga anledningar. Det har varit svårt att knuffa mig själv att lära mig så mycket, jag bor i ett nytt land under julen men utan mina traditioner, vintermörket, mamas dyra operation (jag hjälpade med kostnad eftersom de har inte råd), jag gjörde sonder glasögon (dyra men inte än dyrt). Lyckliga tider.

(The course has finished. That's good because my memory has become full of new words and expressions. I need time to digest everything and use them in sentences. Instead of the course I worked at AZ on Monday and Tuesday. I should have worked the whole week but I've been a bit sick and depressed for the last roughly 10-12 days. There's many possible reasons. It's been hard to push myself to learn so much, I'm living in a new country during Christmas but without my traditions, the darkness of winter, Mom's operation (I helped with the cost since they can't afford it), I broke my glasses (expensive but not as expensive). Happy times.)

Inte allt var dåligt. Jag hade flera träffer med en tjej. En var på en Lucia- och julkoncert på domkyrken. Hennes syster sjöng i köret. De sjöng bl.a "Silent Night, Holy Night", som påminde mig om mänga förre jular. T.ex, när Sara, Jessica och jag gick upp och ner Canyon Road på luminariapromenaden julafton kväll för två år sedan. I alla fall, tjejen (som ska vara anonym här) och jag pratade mycket. Det var jättefint att samtala med annan som är intelligent och snygg och en nörd men vi bestämde oss att vi inte tillräckligt matchar. Ännu var de mina första svenska träffer. Bl.a lärde jag mer om skillnader mellan vanor i Sverige och USA.

(Not everything was bad. I had a few days with a woman. [The word "tjej" doesn't translate directly to English. It's the female equivalent of "guy" or "dude".] One was to a Lucia/Christmas concert at the catherdral. Her sister sang in the choir. They sang (amoung other things) "Silent Night, Holy Night", which reminded me of many previous Christmases. For example, the time a couple of years ago when Sara, Jessica and I went up and down Canyon Road (in Santa Fe) doing the luminary walk on Christmas Eve. In any case, the woman (who shall be anonymous here) and I talked. It was very nice to converse with someone who is intelligen and pretty and a nerd, but we decided that we don't match well enough. Still, they were my first Swedish dates. Amoung other things I learned more about the differences between customs in Sweden and the US.)

beachhead

I have established a beachhead on the Swedish language coastline. Starting approximately 10 days ago (24 November) I was able to have conversations about more than the topics revolving around dance and my background. Not hard conversations, and very slowly. But conversations. It's funny though in that I still hear things in English. My grasp is more at the code book level, as I translate the words and assemble the result. A few times I can construct sentences using Swedish grammar instead of English but my speaking rate drops even further.

According to Jacob my grammar isn't all that bad. I'm mostly getting the word order correct, and mostly getting my declensions to agree, and mostly getting the right pronounciation. Jag börjar förstå svenska istället för att förstöra det.

My current nemesis is partikel verb. Verbs followed by particles. English has the same thing, and I never realized it. For a simple example "I blew the horn" vs. "I blew up the horn" mean rather different things. Even better, "I blew up the pipe" could mean that I exhaled into an pipe going upwards, or making it explode. There's a slightly different pronouncation in those two.

Swedish has the same thing. "att hälsa" means "to greet" while "att hälsa på" means "to visit (somebody)". Depending on the stress "Jag hälsade på dig" means "I greeted you" or "I visited you". But then again like English there are words with different meanings, each with different prepositions and which are not particle verbs. (Particle verb have the stress on the particle.) For example, "att höra" means "to belong" and "to hear". "Det hör till ..." always means "It belongs to" because "till" is not used with hearing. Like in English, "I hear to" does not make sense.

While in Swedish you can "hear after" ("höra efter") something, meaning to inquire about something.

It takes 10 years to master a new topic. I've got more than 9 years to go. :)