Identity Crisis

Dancing is an interesting sport. And yes, it's a sport. It's art too, but it IS a sport. I think the reason I said that three times is because when I started dancing I didn't think so. To be honest, I thought dancing was a bit affected. It wasn't a REAL sport, not like things I did, like running track or lifting weights. Those are REAL sports. But, as you know, I now love dancing and understand, all too clearly, how active it is. Like today. I'm nursing a pulled leg muscle. It hurts just as much as when I did it running.

And that leads me to the first unusual thing about dancing. It is a paired sport. A partner sport. So what does that mean? Many things. As a partner sport, both people have to be "on" for you to have an "on" night. Both people have to be OK with correcting or suggesting. Both people have to like a dance to want to do it. Some dancers might argue with that last one, but for Gary and me, we neither want to do a dance the other does not like. And for the most part, we agree on what we want to dance, even though I like the Latin dances more than he does, and he likes the foxtrot more than I do.

The second unusual thing about dancing as a sport is to specialize or not to specialize. As I have said before, Gary and I are not by the book ballroom dancers. We don't follow a prescribed criteria. The good part of that is, well, we can basically do anything we want. The bad part is the possibilities are endless. How many dances do we want to learn? How many can we learn and be good? Or, should we have a specialty and then the others are mediocre? Do venues drive what we learn, or should we learn the dances we love and search out proper places to go dance them in? This is different from most sports. Usually someone picks just one. In dancing, each dance is a separate entity, and while there are cross over skills, a salsa is not in any way a waltz. And venues are usually not a reason for selecting a sport. You can run anywhere, after all.

Gary and I talked this over at the beginning of the year. What we've decided...for now...is to stay in the question. We are, after all, still beginners and just two years into our dancing. We know a few ballroom dances, enough to get by at fancy places. We know a couple of Latin dances, again, enough to go to a salsa club and not feel like dweebs. The clubs we attend are pretty much covered with all the swing dances we know plus the smattering of other dances . And of course, we rock at swing dance venues.

So if swing is something we both very much love, would we want to do just that? No. If only for an entry way to other dances someday we do not want to shut everything else out. Bottom line there are just too many neat dances to choose a few.

And so for 2009, we will keep our dancing identity open. Happy New Year!