Dansons: 1 My First Lesson
“You can tell how experienced a dancer is by how much he brags to friends and strangers. As a rule of thumb, the more one brags about it, the worse their skills. Shun away from those who brags and try to demonstrate their moves in public.”
The first dance lesson of my life was a private one-on-one with the teacher (a waste of money if you are just starting out by the way). It sounds ridiculous if I tell you that we spent the whole lesson learning just one box step… if you can call a box step a step. In the world of dancing, a box step is like walking, the most natural things that you have to be able to do and the hardest to master correctly, while the actual steps are that of a fancy back-flip, pretty.
The amount of information you have to absorb to do a proper box step is only overwhelming for a beginner starting dance lessons. In this case, me. I think this is due to the fact that, before this moment in my life, I’ve never thought about stepping sideways, let along doing it in a particular sequence alternating between forward, back, right and left. It was an “idée nouvelle”. If you are having problems imagining this, try writing with your other hand. A suggestion to beginners at this point, is to forget about perfectionism. You will never get it right as a beginner and at this point in your dance career, it’s more important that you go through the flow so your body can get used to it. The next day, you will have sore muscles in places you didn’t know you have muscles and after a week or two, it won’t be as hard. Thanks to my fortunate choice of teacher, I got through this part smoothly.
Contty was patient, beautiful with well toned body and have a six pack stomach. She’s also, 10 years older than me and made her the most experienced teacher in that studio (They usually don’t take noobs like me). I think she’s partially the reason, why years later, I find myself preferring girls with long black curly hair with toned bodies instead of the usual blond skinny girls that composed the western “higher society” which the average Asian prefers.
So, with a private lesson and later a group lesson in my belt, I felt a bit cocky and decided to show up to a dance party…
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