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My Dancing -- Socially and Competitively

(You can also visit my main ballroom page if you haven't seen it yet.)

Social Dancing:

I started ballroom dancing around the beginning of November in 1996 and have been dancing pretty regularly ever since then. Normally I go social dancing at least once a week to the outings arranged by our club, Ballroom At Maryland. Normally the only times I miss outings are when I'm not here in College Park to be able to go, like if I go back home to NJ on break. On rare occasions I'll skip a dance if it's something I can tell I won't really enjoy; things like swing dances where the focus is one dance or style I don't really care for and will sometimes skip.

I was social dancing for a bit over one semester before I actually started taking classes. I took two beginner American style classes in summer 1997 because it's standard practice around here to learn some American style first and then switched to International style, my preference. I've been taking international style classes, when offered on campus, ever since then. Somewhere along the way I would like to take some more American style classes and other classes as well, but for now I'm focusing on International style since I like it better anyway. :) The classes are great, we've got great teachers, and I've learned quite a lot since I started taking them. (I also have step sheets and combination sheets from the classes I've taken so far.) Not only have I learned new steps, but I've also learned a lot about technique and lead and follow which is always useful.

I put all the stuff I've learned into practice by going social dancing and trying it out. I prefer dancing International style and use it almost all the time, but I do know some American style as well and will use that, too, but only on rare occasions. A lot of times I'll prefer to adapt international than dance American style. The current list of dances I know includes foxtrot, tango, waltz, quickstep, rumba, cha cha, samba, jive, swing, viennese waltz, and (some) paso doble. Some dances that I'd like to learn when I can include mambo, bolero, hustle, merengue, polka, argentine tango, and west coast swing. Social dancing is where I get to practice my floorcraft and avoiding collisions since that's hard to do in class where everyone's dancing the same sequence in the same way, etc. The dancing also gets me away from school and work at least one night a week which is great, because we all need a break from work at some point, and I get to meet lots of people and talk and have fun and everything. It's a great time.

Competitive Dancing:

Competitions are a lot of fun, too. I found that out after my first one and decided that I enjoyed it enough to want to keep competing, so I did for a while. Comps are basically a weekend full of nothing but ballroom dancing. The general setup for a college level comp is final preparations and social dance on Friday night, the comp on Saturday (*all day* Saturday, like 8am to midnight), and some workshops on Sunday morning. The great thing about comps is getting to meet people from other schools that you normally wouldn't get to meet and dancing for the whole weekend. :) The workshops are essentially free lessons and how can you pass those up? Sometimes they're good, sometimes not so much, but the information you pick up at them should be useful at some point, even if you can't use it right away. Usually there's even a little time for some general dancing in between events, so you can dance with all those new people from other schools that you've just met. Sometimes I wish there was more general dancing than there is, but after all, we do go there to compete, not to social dance. Oh, and being a college student means that we get reduced prices (normally) and we can get some great deals on some competitions, so there's another reason to go, it's relatively inexpensive. :) Also, your dancing generally improves when you compete. You have to work a little harder on your dancing if you want to do well and that helps you improve. If you've never competed yet, you should think about giving it a try, you might like it. There are enough positives to it that you should at least give it a try. No one says you have to continue if you don't like it. If you're looking for suggestions on preparing for competitions, you might want to take a look at these workshop notes from a little workshop given by our dance teacher before we hosted our competition in 1997. School has been keeping me pretty busy lately (working on a PhD thesis is hard! ;) ), so I don't know if I'll have the time to do more competitions and even if I do, I'm not sure I really want to put the effort into preparing for them that you have to do in order to do well. I may just stick to social dancing for the time being.

This part is more for my own records than anything else, but in case you're interested, here's the list of competitions I went to and placings (if any). I've put the age and level before the dances since it's common to all the dances listed after it. I could list how far I got in every event I competed in, but that would take a lot of space and most of you probably don't care all that much :) so I think I'll just stick to listing only the events that I reached the finals in.

West Point Dancesport Festival (April 1997)

Student Beginner:

Capital Games Dancesport (June 1997)

College Beginner:

USA Dancesport National Championships (August 1997)

Adult A Bronze Syllabus:

Fall BAM Jam (October 1997)

Student Beginner:

Ohio Star Ball (November 1997)

College Beginner:

College Intermediate:

Maryland Invitational Dance Championships (June 1998)

Adult A Bronze Syllabus

Adult A Silver Syllabus:

DC DanceSport Inferno (November 1998)

Intermediate (a.k.a. Syllabus):
Other Events:

Teachers

This section is here mainly because I thought it would be interesting to keep a record of the teachers that I've learned from over the years. I'm including teachers that I've had fairly regular contact with through either group lessons or private lessons as well as teachers that I've only met through the special opportunities afforded by various types of workshops. I'd like to thank them all for sharing their time and expertise and thus helping me learn ballroom dancing. Any problems I may have with my dancing are my fault alone; some things are just harder to get and take more time and practice to understand. :) If I've inadvertently left anyone out, I sincerely apologize; my recollection of where and when I've worked with certain teachers may be slightly faulty, especially for the time when I was just starting in ballroom dancing. So, with the notes above having been said, here are the teachers that I've been able to work with over the years, in alphabetical order:

Dan Calloway, Bill Davies, Jean-Marc Genereux, Richard Hopkins, Darren Jarmain, Julius Kaiser, Lasca Low, Michelle Mason, Timothy Mason, France Mousseau, Silke Nowak, Michelle Officer, Beverley Anne Rees, Edward Simon, Karen Trimble.

James Marshall
dronak@yahoo.com (plain ASCII text only, please, here's why)
This page was last updated on September 18, 2001.

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