(no subject)
Some girls from a Cultures of Dance class contacted me a week or so ago because they'd heard I was someone to go to for information about flamenco. (Funny how wearing ruffly skirts everywhere will cause these foundless rumors to travel...) They were doing a final project on it for the class, and wanted to know where they could take a lesson, since part of their presentation had to be a demonstration. I directed them to the Zorongo website, but pointed out that, unfortunately, the fall session there just ended. So they asked me to teach them. Which scared me all to hell, because it's been months and months since I was doing flamenco really regularly, and I've deteriorated so much I don't even want to think about it. But I figured that, since none of them knew anything about it beyond the research-in-books they had done, my body would probably remember enough of the basics for me to bullshit my way through it. (Although I was still freaked at the idea that they thought they could have something to demonstrate, after just one lesson...)
Well. It turned out to be totally awesome. We met in the dance studio, I brought all my skirts and all my shoes and my castanets and some bits and pieces from my CD collection, gave them an earful of history and context, and then threw a ton of basic arm, skirt, and foot movements at them. I was kind of babbly and incoherent, I thought -- they asked really good and tough-to-answer questions -- but they seemed to love it, and they picked up the moves I showed them amazingly quickly. I managed to teach them in forty minutes what it probably took me my first three classes to learn. By the end I had two of them doing palmas for tangos while the other two did a really short simple footwork combination -- perfectly in rhythm with all the right emphases and plenty of good solid noise, and, unbelievable as it sounds, up to tempo. Wow.
Yay them. Yay me, for not chickening out on teaching them. And above all, how awesome to discover that I actually still know a respectable amount about this. I can't dance for shit anymore, really, but the information is still in my head, and I still care about it intensely, even if it's not something I have time to pursue properly at the moment.
Their presentation is tomorrow. They're listing me as a reference on their bibliography. Hehehe. I'm a bibliographic reference! The thrill of this honor definitely justifies all that time and sweat and money and tears and freezing my butt off waiting for the bus in the dead of winter...
... Dammit, I want to take flamenco classes again.