So, I'm starting to approach the point in time where I consider myself a "dancer." I guess that means that I'm finally starting to feel a little more confident in how I move and stuff like that. In reality though, I'm still quite new to this artform. I've been dancing about three and a half years total, but only over the last year and a half have I become a competitive/serious dancer, though that hasn't been without it's interuptions. The promising thing for me is that I am finally at the stage where I will start to make the most improvement. This video here is the Gold II Rumba from BYU during the winter 2008 semester. I've edited out my teacher making comments because if you've any sort of dancing eye you'll probably notice what he talked about, and he probably wouldn't like to find out that he's on the internet. This was my first semester in the class, so if my partner looks a bit more polished than I that's because she is (she's had the class before), plus, she's just naturally a much better dancer than me anyway. . . she's a lady. We'd probably covered this routine in class for about two weeks by the time we video'd (six hours of class), though I had done my best to learn the routine ahead of time from a video. From my own perspective I need a lot of work. I don't like my arm movement, but I think private lessons would help greatly there. My spins are pathetic, but are also improving. Posture has been a big problem in the past, but it is much better, though there are a few spots where I have relapses in this video. Anyway, for all my rabid fans out there, this is me dancing the rumba, one of my better dances.
And, just FYI, I don't usually dance with gum.
Furthermore, after all the work I put into writing this post, I'm getting some sort of error message when I try to upload the video, so, I guess you can use this link to youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6Hy4HWPEHA
1 comment:
I'm still rather uncomfortable with the designation myself. Steven Pinker, in his book "The Stuff of Thought", explains some of my discomfort with the fact that "dancer" is a relatively specific common noun. He writes:
"It's not just the owners of trademarks that get their Jockeys in a knot when they hear a cherished referent identified with a common noun. People take even greater umbrage when they hear themselves labeled with a common noun. The reason is that a noun predicate appears to pigeonhole them with the stereotype of a category rather than referring to them as an individual who happens to possess a trait. Logicians would be hard-pressed to specify the difference, but psychologically it matters a great deal. You can innocuously describe someone's hair as blond, brunette, or red (adjectives), but it's a trickier business to refer to the whole person, particularly a woman, as a blonde, a brunette, or a redhead (nouns). The terms seem to reduce the woman to a sexually attractive physical feature, and to typecast her, according to old stereotypes, as flighty, sophisticated, or hot-tempered. Since metonyms derogate and hypernyms elevate (see chapter 2), nowadays we refer to someone as a woman with blond hair rather than as a blonde, unless the conversation was specifically about hair. An increased regard to the dignity of the individual has also led to the retirement of nouns for people with infirmities such as cripple, hunchback, deaf-mute, mongoloid, leper, and even diabetic. And today there is a movement in psychiatry to avoid calling someone a schizophrenic or an alcoholic and instead refer to him or her as a person with schizophrenia or a person with alcoholism. A sensitivity to the typecasting power of nouns led the director and medical scholar Jonathan Miller to speak for many people of his ethnicity when he said, "I'm not a Jew. I'm Jew-ish. I don't go the whole hog". "
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