Learn to dance

When I was a kid my Grandparents always danced, I remember going to the club attached to my granddads work and they would always be on the dance floor doing a Waltz or the Foxtrot or any other Ballroom number that would be played so I guess it was only natural that my parents learned to dance. I had brief interludes while I was growing up where my parents tried to encourage me to learn but I was never really interested, mainly because this meant dancing with my sister and I am pretty sure she had the same feeling as I did on the subject. I am not saying that my sister and I hated each other, far from it. We actually got on really well growing up but she was always taller than me despite being 2 year younger so apart from it looking silly it wasn’t the easiest of pastimes to pursue. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I actually started to become interested in learning but even then I initially took a little convincing. My parents told me that a new class was starting for beginners at the place where they had lessons and I knew that this was something Keely was interested in so I agreed to give it a go, if it wasn’t for me then we didn’t have to go again. Oddly enough I actually took to it. The first class saw us learning the very basic moves. I am sure the first thing we did was the Square Tango which was just a 3 step basic movement to ease us into the idea of dancing together. Once we had actually learned how to do the Waltz this dance was dropped as it the basic Waltz is very similar and we soon started to add the twirls as well as other additional movements. The class was initially quite full, there were about 4 of 5 couples learning in total but one by one the numbers dwindled away until we were the only ones, we then moved into the same class as my parents. There were now 6 people in this class and we found that we improved quickly when we joined this class as we had quite a bit of catching up to do. The class is ballroom and Latin but we soon realised that the Latin stuff doesn’t really appeal and we much prefer the Ballroom. My favourite of all the dances is the Foxtrot, I really do feel like I am dancing when I do this as there are 19 basic steps instead of the 3 or 4 that are in the Waltz and Quickstep. I imagine myself looking like my Granddad when he was dancing, I probably look really clumsy in truth but it just feels like a really elegant dance. Nowadays we have the class to ourselves as my parents have moved on to sequence dancing, we have managed to pick up a few of these as well along the way but still keep up with the Ballroom and the occasional Cha cha cha, this is the only Latin number we do now but we still refer to it as “The Divorce Dance” as we normally end up getting into quite a mess and blaming each other for the errors. When we were arranging our wedding we knew we had to have a waltz for our first dance, as we had been dancing for quite a while we knew we could easily have a proper first dance rather than the clumsy shuffle that you see at most weddings so we worked with our teacher as she found us the perfect song and even helped us to restrict our dancing to match the size of the space we would have on the day. This is something that I had never considered but I am glad we did this, we were so used to having the whole room to dance in that suddenly finding ourselves in a space the size of 2 tables could have wrecked the whole thing. We rehearsed the dance many times on the run up to the big day and learned a few spins and twirls to make the dance look more interesting but also had the option to exclude these if nerves got the better of us when we were in the middle of the dance. As it happens we did OK and chatted away while we went through our moves. Our first actual dance floor experience other than the wedding dance was quite daunting, there seemed to be people everywhere and my head was moving faster than my feet as I kept on the look out to see if I was going to collide with someone or if they were going to bash into us. I can only compare it to passing your driving test and then being sent out on to the starting grid at brands hatch. I felt I was fully in at the deep end. I still find a crowded dance floor a little intimidating, particularly when there are really good dancers out there. When I am feeling that way I remember what my Dad told me when we first came off the Dance floor and sat in our seats looking dazed and confused. He told me “nobody is watching, they are all there to dance, it is not a competition. Just get out there and enjoy it, we all make mistakes, it is how we learn and improve”. He also added that if we were not prepared to go and dance on an actual dance floor with other people then we were just wasting money on lessons. Anyone can dance in an empty room, it is much more fun when you are dancing with others and everyone up there had to learn at some point. Since that little pep talk we have been to a few dances and I have even danced the Waltz, Quickstep and Foxtrot with my mom.