More and more dancers showed up. In daylight wearing rather dull clothes I now recognised about 40% of them from the night before :-).
I picked up a lot from the ‘all level lindy classes’ I had in the morning. The lunch break was good fun too. I got lost in the good company of another tourist trying to find a place to eat by ‘just walking down the street and have a look’ :-). We should’ve checked our welcome packs! They included a nicely prepared map with all food places highlighted with little stars :-). Oh well! We didn’t end up hungry though as some of the more organised dancers brought us back food after an emergency phone call.
After lunch all of a sudden there was a different crowd in my class. I didn’t worry about it much though. The first move was called out, shown once and everyone nailed it, except me!! Hmm… ok. I was thinking it could be me being a bit slow. 5 minutes later I got it but by then we’d moved on with 3 more moves, all built on top of that first one. I was completely lost and then found myself in a ‘spare follow gap’ as well, which didn’t help.
I picked up a lot from the ‘all level lindy classes’ I had in the morning. The lunch break was good fun too. I got lost in the good company of another tourist trying to find a place to eat by ‘just walking down the street and have a look’ :-). We should’ve checked our welcome packs! They included a nicely prepared map with all food places highlighted with little stars :-). Oh well! We didn’t end up hungry though as some of the more organised dancers brought us back food after an emergency phone call.
After lunch all of a sudden there was a different crowd in my class. I didn’t worry about it much though. The first move was called out, shown once and everyone nailed it, except me!! Hmm… ok. I was thinking it could be me being a bit slow. 5 minutes later I got it but by then we’d moved on with 3 more moves, all built on top of that first one. I was completely lost and then found myself in a ‘spare follow gap’ as well, which didn’t help.
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| Kiwi teachers Dave and Emma |
Also my stupid nose wouldn’t stop running and my head was sore, so I moved back slowly and sat down to watch the others. I remember I had read about advanced classes for very experienced dancers and teachers. I also remembered to try my best not to book any of those :-). I sneaked over to lovely Angela (one of the organisers) who was preparing something in a corner of the room. I told her and she said there must have been some sort of mistake and sent me over to the ‘all level lindy class’ in another room.
I joined in for the last minutes and found out afterwards that they’d tried to even out the numbers in the classes and I was mistaken for a dancer from Auckland with the same name. It’s a good name I must say and I’m flattered :-). To be honest, for my sore head and throat it was probably good to have a bit of a rest. The advantage of having been to both classes was that I collected the very first advanced move plus a couple of little variations from the other class :-).
Exactly like Jeremy predicted I’d made more friends by the end of the day and was looked after well. I was invited back to Bob’s house to get ready for the big night. Bob is just lovely and a local dancer. He is also one of the hosts for the festival and was looking after the green Dunedin dancer Matt. Not only that, Bob was also taking part in the South Island Championships that were about to take place. He was in the category for dancers that had been dancing under one year.
I joined in for the last minutes and found out afterwards that they’d tried to even out the numbers in the classes and I was mistaken for a dancer from Auckland with the same name. It’s a good name I must say and I’m flattered :-). To be honest, for my sore head and throat it was probably good to have a bit of a rest. The advantage of having been to both classes was that I collected the very first advanced move plus a couple of little variations from the other class :-).
Exactly like Jeremy predicted I’d made more friends by the end of the day and was looked after well. I was invited back to Bob’s house to get ready for the big night. Bob is just lovely and a local dancer. He is also one of the hosts for the festival and was looking after the green Dunedin dancer Matt. Not only that, Bob was also taking part in the South Island Championships that were about to take place. He was in the category for dancers that had been dancing under one year.
We made it back from Bob’s to the ‘Salsa Latina’ just in time for the Championships. I didn’t feel too bad at all after a hot shower and some food holding a glass of wine in my hand ready for the show.
To be honest, I’d pictured the South Island championships to be slightly different. A bit more like you’d think of the South European Championships I guess. Those would probably include hundreds of dancers from all sorts of countries competing. It had slipped my mind that not that many people live on the South Island. There are just over one million actually.
So it happened that the same dancers competed in different categories, wearing different outfits. Little breaks were needed sometimes, so the costumes could be changed and a few deep breaths taken. I was just so impressed! They must have practiced for so long doing all that!
It was just a great show! Amazing performances in all categories! They were very different to anything else I’d seen before. Some were almost like a play or musical, done to the lyrics of the songs or better the song picked for the performances. There was some humor in them too. I think I might have even got some of that despite being German :-)!
Amongst the group performers some of the dancers had come all the way from Timaru :-). They pulled quite an impressive group performance and got a lot of applause! I chatted to one of the performers afterwards. His name is Justus, who had a funny role as a burglar in the show. After chatting for a bit, I made him ‘the interesting dancer to talk to’ for this festival. You can read more about him later on.
Amongst the group performers some of the dancers had come all the way from Timaru :-). They pulled quite an impressive group performance and got a lot of applause! I chatted to one of the performers afterwards. His name is Justus, who had a funny role as a burglar in the show. After chatting for a bit, I made him ‘the interesting dancer to talk to’ for this festival. You can read more about him later on.
It was my cold again that made me skip the blues late night party to get some sleep and recovery. I heard only the best things about it the next day though :-).
Here more photos of the winners :-):
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