Last Saturday, I called my mother. As soon as she answered, I enthusiastically said, “Happy Mother’s Day!” She hesitated a moment before saying, “Today’s not Mother’s Day.” I happily responded, “I know. I just wanted to practice!” She laughed for a solid minute, which was a far more valuable gift than the one that showed up a week later in the mail.
I usually call my mother at least once a week, but I knew the competition would be fierce on the actual day among my two older sisters and me. As I correctly guessed, Mom had a full day planned and truthfully, this weekend was quite busy for me as well. Mom always assumes that when she calls and has to leave a message that I’m out dancing. And I love the way she says it: You must be out DAN-cing–with much emphasis on the first syllable, full of joy and wishful thinking. For this weekend, she was correct.
I literally kicked off my weekend on Friday evening by doing a capoeira performance at a heritage program sponsored by my school. I had worn my capoeira uniform to school and showed all my classes a few videos from my group during the last ten minutes of class. Many of my students had never heard of capoeira; so I took advantage of the teachable moment.
Before my performance, I had the pleasure of meeting Lloyd Doggett, who came to make opening remarks at the start of the program. I walked right up to him, introduced myself as a science teacher and asked if he’d take a picture with me. I have no idea if he hung around to watch my group play capoeira or not, but one of his people took a picture of us as well. I hope they use the picture to show how diverse teachers’ hobbies are.
Since only a few capoeiristas showed up, each of us had to play a lot. Two things I learned from this: I need to practice playing more in our training rodas in order to build up stamina and I need to attend more capoeira music classes. A few times, I had to drum in order to let another capoeirista play in the roda. Let’s just say that not all Black people have natural rhythm!
Afterwards, I dashed off to the gym to do my usual Friday night lap swim. Even though most Fridays I feel pretty drained, a good swim truly does wonders for my back and knees.
Saturday morning, I spent nearly two hours painting on my balcony while talking to my mother. It was almost too much of a good thing since I had to make a mad dash to an all day salsa workshop. I’d learned my lesson last fall about attending a dance workshop three days in a row. So, I figured five hours of salsa wouldn’t be too bad, right?
The first class I attended was about musicality. I enjoyed how the instructor dissected the music, isolating each rhythm found in most salsa songs. He gave us a different dance step to do with each and at the end of the class, we practiced the whole routine that we’d practiced to a real song.
The second class I attended was Dominican bachata, which I now know is my absolute favorite version of the dance. When I first saw people doing bachata here in Austin, I looked around to see if anyone else was alarmed at the pornographic gyration going on. Up until then, I thought I’d lost all the prudishness I’d adopted while living in Egypt, but apparently I had some reserves. The Dominican bachata is the traditional style with a lot of footwork, yet looks far more sensual.
By the time I hit the third class in a row, I was just about at my absorption point, which meant that it was not an ideal time to take a shine class. Shines are supposed to add flavor to your basic salsa. By the end of the class, my salsa flavor was “lost-in thyme”. I knew the moves, but just couldn’t get my body to cooperate. I was tired and hungry. The instuctors, who happened to be brothers, kept hyping us with yelps of encouragement as they drilled us through the routine, but as I glanced around at my fellow salsa zombies, I decided to put myself out of misery.
A friend and I beat the crowd to the bar to order food and just relax before another two hours of classes. Somewhat refreshed after lunch, I attended my fourth class, pachanga. I’d never heard of it before, which was my main motivation for taking the class. Someone had told me that panchanga was a variation of chacha. That’s like saying a Ferrari is a variation of a car. And you pretty much have to move that quickly to dance pachanga. I do better in a samba class when it comes to dancing at warp speed.
Finally, I ended the day with a bonafide chacha class with the distinction that this chacha class had the word “funk” in it. Unlike the first time I took a cardiofunk aerobic class, I wasn’t the only Black person in the room and the other students didn’t consult me on how to do the steps. The “funk” was a wonderful assortment of dance moves that voluptuous women with capoeira-toned butts love doing: dramatically swaying the booty from right to left; spinning around quickly and stopping with one hip up; body wave; body wave to the cha-cha-cha beat; and my personal favorite, the side-to-side samba step that gets the booty undulating while rocking.
Never has taking a shower, followed by a nap felt so good. As a matter of fact, I consider taking a nap part of my getting ready to go out routine. I put on my black belly dancing pants and a beautifully embroidered, sleeveless Indian top and returned to the hotel for the salsa show and dance party. The show featured salsero groups from around the world, who did the most stunning moves. One group in particular even did some quasi-cirque du soleil moves, tossing the women up in the air and stylishly catching the before they crashed to the floor.
After the show, we all exited so the room could be prepared for the dance party. Basically, most of the chairs and recording equipment had to be moved. Instead of having one big dance floor, there were about four or five portable wooden dance floors, which naturally provided carpeted pathways throughout the ballroom. I met my dancing quota within two and a half hours–scarcely using a single move I’d learned in five hours of salsa classes. I left around 1:30 since I wanted to have enough energy to make it to my 10 am yoga class on Sunday.
As I figured, I played phone tag with my mother and one of my sisters on Mother’s Day, but Mom’s message sounded happy as she detailed how she was enjoying her day. After yoga, I normally clean my apartment, wash clothes and then chill…but not today. To round out the weekend, I attended one more dance workshop: milonga.
There are three distinct tango rhythms: tango, vals (waltz) and milonga. Milonga is the peppier of the three and when done improperly, one hops from one step to the next. The guest instructor was from Buenos Aires just like my regular tango teachers. He was charming, funny and had an eagle eye when it came to correcting our errors.
It’s misleading to think that I can both salsa and tango well. Truth is, I step too widely when I salsa and too narrowly when I tango, but I’m too stubborn to give up one or the other to become really good at either. I know my destiny doesn’t lie in becoming a professional dancer. I dance to be sociable although it’s safe to say that I over-frolicked this weekend, especially if you consider capoeira a dance.
Thank goodness I have to go to work tomorrow. I need the rest.
