Throughout one’s life, windows open and close. Sometimes
they don't close fully and remain tantalisingly apparent, a stillborn
opportunity to re-examine, perhaps in the future.
Dancing was always something I enjoyed when I was young. In those days we never considered lessons, there was always someone to take you onto the floor and slowly we got the hang of it. Perhaps it marks the amateurish way we approached everything in those days, we learnt by doing,
Today there is much more emphasis on being taught. You don't any more just buy a coil of rope and some gadgets to help secure you to the rock face having read in a book what the greats used to do. You don't set off, with no tutoring, into the Lake District up the rock face as best you could learning all the way.
Today, everything is tutored from the first step. There is of course a great deal of common sense in this approach but it seems to me to take away much of the spontaneity.
Anyway dancing was something I thought I could do and even thought I was good
at. Perhaps again it’s a case of how memory plays tricks on us.
I had been in the pub on Saturday night after the rugby. The place had gone quiet as the afternoon drinkers went home and the evening crowd were still to arrive. The young woman behind the bar is a really nice person and a good conversationalist. We started talking about dancing since I knew she taught dance and had a particular interest the Argentinian Samba. "We are giving dance lessons at the Rhodes centre on Monday night why don't you come"?
So there I was last night lining up in the beginners class being taught the jive.
What can they teach me about the jive! I've rock n rolled down the years through many a happy hour.
Well almost immediately my world came crashing down as the moves I knew, or thought I knew were broken down into segments. The left foot and the right arm were asked to be in places which seemed to me to be unnatural and unproductive.
I have often said I suffer from dyslexia. When I approach a tee junction in a car and the passenger says go right I instinctively want to turn left and have to reconcile what my brain wants to do and what I am being told to do.
And so,it was on the dance floor, I was making a right Muppet of myself as the feet and the legs wanted to go the wrong way. Talk about two left feet, I couldn't decide if I had a left foot !!
My confusion pronounced on my gift for dancing, I couldn't do it, I need to be spontaneous, the memory would see me through but I was in the grip of conformity, "build the basic moves and then you can experiment" whilst I had taught myself to experiment to gain the moves !!
Music is a great motivator. The first bars of a tune can set the toes tapping and the urge to get up and dance in infectious. Unfortunately the music they played was, to my ears, mass produced which didn't stimulate me one little bit.
So there I was feeling like a fish out of water having one of my dreams trashed. The young women who had suggested I try it was busy involved in running the sessions so I sat there like the proverbial wall flower wondering what had induced me to come.
Eventually I did have one dance with her and was able to free up and improvise a bit, earning the compliment that I had good rhythm, the basis for any sort of dancing. A crumb of sorts to heal my bruised ego.
I keep on forgetting I'm 74. A sedentary 74, who keeps chastising himself for not exercising at all but not doing anything about it. The moment of truth comes when in full flow the chest tightens and the muscles refuse to perform. It's now a case of ‘how long to the end of the dance’, in the past you wanted to go on for ever !!
Lastly to really bring everything up to date and into perspective I've started to lose my balance.
In my jive days I would make the up moves on the hop, this taught one to improvise along the lines that you had seen the professionals do, a spin, a change of emphasise or direction melded by the beat and the expressiveness you read into the music. It all relied on the dexterity of ones feet and above all, balance.
You had to have the confidence of a high wire exponent to pull off the moves but when the wind goes, along with the balance, perhaps it's time to bow out.
The evening was not altogether without its highlight. Watching the young women from the pub dancing the tango was superb.
The dance from the hot blooded South Americas is a piece of theatre between a man and a woman. Sultry is the best description. An acknowledgement of the immemorial display between man and woman, between the yin and yang, between seduction and potency. The man is the rock around which the woman works her wiles.
From the moment they lightly embrace their bodies, each fitting the other in an embrace, the dance is a slow exposition of coltish suspended passion which the women weaves around him as she places her leg first this way and then that against his partially extended leg.
The slow, subterfuge unfurls, giving and withholding, temping yet denying, gently kicking aside the foot then stepping over the leg to stop, with a seductive lifting of the lower leg, the knee bending, the kick but, in the feline interplay not to go far, brought back yet again to the outstretched leg of the male, another step over and another kick as if to say, I'm free I'm still free.
It was fascinating and highly charged. One could guess, that, back home in Argentina after this display; they would have no problem with their birth rate!!
Dancing was always something I enjoyed when I was young. In those days we never considered lessons, there was always someone to take you onto the floor and slowly we got the hang of it. Perhaps it marks the amateurish way we approached everything in those days, we learnt by doing,
Today there is much more emphasis on being taught. You don't any more just buy a coil of rope and some gadgets to help secure you to the rock face having read in a book what the greats used to do. You don't set off, with no tutoring, into the Lake District up the rock face as best you could learning all the way.
Today, everything is tutored from the first step. There is of course a great deal of common sense in this approach but it seems to me to take away much of the spontaneity.
I had been in the pub on Saturday night after the rugby. The place had gone quiet as the afternoon drinkers went home and the evening crowd were still to arrive. The young woman behind the bar is a really nice person and a good conversationalist. We started talking about dancing since I knew she taught dance and had a particular interest the Argentinian Samba. "We are giving dance lessons at the Rhodes centre on Monday night why don't you come"?
So there I was last night lining up in the beginners class being taught the jive.
What can they teach me about the jive! I've rock n rolled down the years through many a happy hour.
Well almost immediately my world came crashing down as the moves I knew, or thought I knew were broken down into segments. The left foot and the right arm were asked to be in places which seemed to me to be unnatural and unproductive.
I have often said I suffer from dyslexia. When I approach a tee junction in a car and the passenger says go right I instinctively want to turn left and have to reconcile what my brain wants to do and what I am being told to do.
And so,it was on the dance floor, I was making a right Muppet of myself as the feet and the legs wanted to go the wrong way. Talk about two left feet, I couldn't decide if I had a left foot !!
My confusion pronounced on my gift for dancing, I couldn't do it, I need to be spontaneous, the memory would see me through but I was in the grip of conformity, "build the basic moves and then you can experiment" whilst I had taught myself to experiment to gain the moves !!
Music is a great motivator. The first bars of a tune can set the toes tapping and the urge to get up and dance in infectious. Unfortunately the music they played was, to my ears, mass produced which didn't stimulate me one little bit.
So there I was feeling like a fish out of water having one of my dreams trashed. The young women who had suggested I try it was busy involved in running the sessions so I sat there like the proverbial wall flower wondering what had induced me to come.
Eventually I did have one dance with her and was able to free up and improvise a bit, earning the compliment that I had good rhythm, the basis for any sort of dancing. A crumb of sorts to heal my bruised ego.
I keep on forgetting I'm 74. A sedentary 74, who keeps chastising himself for not exercising at all but not doing anything about it. The moment of truth comes when in full flow the chest tightens and the muscles refuse to perform. It's now a case of ‘how long to the end of the dance’, in the past you wanted to go on for ever !!
Lastly to really bring everything up to date and into perspective I've started to lose my balance.
In my jive days I would make the up moves on the hop, this taught one to improvise along the lines that you had seen the professionals do, a spin, a change of emphasise or direction melded by the beat and the expressiveness you read into the music. It all relied on the dexterity of ones feet and above all, balance.
You had to have the confidence of a high wire exponent to pull off the moves but when the wind goes, along with the balance, perhaps it's time to bow out.
The evening was not altogether without its highlight. Watching the young women from the pub dancing the tango was superb.
The dance from the hot blooded South Americas is a piece of theatre between a man and a woman. Sultry is the best description. An acknowledgement of the immemorial display between man and woman, between the yin and yang, between seduction and potency. The man is the rock around which the woman works her wiles.
From the moment they lightly embrace their bodies, each fitting the other in an embrace, the dance is a slow exposition of coltish suspended passion which the women weaves around him as she places her leg first this way and then that against his partially extended leg.
The slow, subterfuge unfurls, giving and withholding, temping yet denying, gently kicking aside the foot then stepping over the leg to stop, with a seductive lifting of the lower leg, the knee bending, the kick but, in the feline interplay not to go far, brought back yet again to the outstretched leg of the male, another step over and another kick as if to say, I'm free I'm still free.
It was fascinating and highly charged. One could guess, that, back home in Argentina after this display; they would have no problem with their birth rate!!
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