Sword Practice In Progress!

And boy, is it needed! Thanks to Natalia's kind advice, I tied my hair back, tried to relax and practiced. I can balance it pretty much all the time now, and can even walk forward with it on my head, do vertical hip figure 8s, and sometimes even shimmy when I'm feeling confident! I'm still finding it hard to relax enough to allow my chest to move independantly of my head. It's really annoying! I can do it fine without the sword, my isolations are pretty good if I do say so myself, but I just go too rigid! :) Oh well, more practice. I think it'll just take some time before I'm confident enough with it.

We tried using them in the class yesterday, which was interesting. We balanced and moved around the room, and did some basic moves, then the teacher through this move in where we balanced on one foot, and sort of slid out to the side. Not sideways walking, just a sort of pose, but there was no way I could do that! I just concentrated on standing still! It's harder to do it with the distraction of other people in the class as well, so I just did what I could do. That's what I love about my tribal class. Our teacher lets us go at our own speed, and doesn't mind if we do basic moves if that's all we can remember. She just takes it on board and remembers to drill some of the other moves with us, without pointing out why! It's so different from when I learned things when I was younger, when the teacher would point out (very loudly) that you were making a mistake, and everyone would look at you (usually laughing) while the teacher explained (equally loudly) how to do it right, whether it was maths, dancing (I did tap when I was little), or anything else. My teachers always seemed to do this, but I love it now I have nice teachers!

New Dance Sword! Yay!!!

Yay!!! Dance classes started back up again last week! (That's probably why I haven't updated the blog much during the past week - sorry!) They all started in the same week, Thursday night, then all day Saturday! I was bouncing around all the end of last week, so excited to be going back - I really miss it when I don't have class. I miss the learning, and the people in my class, which is really weird for me since I'm usually terrified of social situations, and don't like people in general much, but the women in my class are so nice!

The classes were just as good as I'd hoped they'd be too. We're starting new routines, which is good - it felt like we'd been doing the last ones for ages, going over and over and over. It's good to learn routines, but I get a bit bored if we go over them for too long - more than a term and I get bored. I don't mind doing it every now and then to get the practice, and to keep it in the memory, but seriously, we went over one routine every week for a year last time. We're also learning new moves in my Saturday class, cos we've got a teacher we don't normally have. It's good to learn new stuff. :) And I discovered that all of my tribal moves have disappeared from my head. Gone. Nothing there. So I'll be practicing them again this year, well, learning them again to be honest.

And . . . we got swords!



A close up of the handle:



I've been looking forward to dancing with swords since like, forever! And now I have one, yay!! It's so hard to balance it though! :) I thought I had pretty good balance, but I get it on my head, and just go absolutely rigid, terrified to move. I don't know why, it's not even sharp at all - I guess I just haven't got used to the feeling of it. It's a lot heavier than I expected, but it seems easier to balance it with a scarf on my head. But somehow that feels like cheating! :) I just want to stick it on my head and dance away! I guess it's just one of those things that I'll need to practice until I get comfortable with it.