What are you excited about in your dancing right now?

I guess what I find exciting particularly today is that I have started believing in dance in my life again. What if I cant' dance? I can still dance every single moment of my life as long as I put my mind to it. After all, dance isn't dance; Dance is life, dance is a way of life.

I got another compliment on my steadily-improving Smooth dancing on Thursday. Yay! :bouncy:

Improving my natural spin turn Apparently I had been kind of muscling my partner through it and it looked rightish! I pulled one on my instructors wife and she was like whoooooooa what are you doing? I'm still a big clumsy but the spin is focusing more on her starting energy not mine

Practice and get as much as possible in muscle memory, the techniques learned last week, Cha cha, Rumba, Waltz..

The feeling of connection and elasticity in partner dancing when you are dancing from your core, using your knees and leg compression and you feel like you are flying along in a fox-trot grapevine covering more ground then you have ever accomplished before. Magical.

I have full and complete Silver Waltz and Quickstep routines!

New part to our Smooth Waltz -- throwaway oversway in an alternate hold to a one-handed same foot lunge to a checked line to a runaround ... SQUEE!

Pro told me yesterday after our lessons that he could see me doing major competitions when I get more experienced. He's a very honest teacher, so it made me feel really nice. Until then, I just gotta keep dancing.

Things are coming together nicely. I have been working with a new rhythm pro for a couple of months now and our routines are coming together nicely for open silver. So far we have swing, bolero and mambo.. next up rumba and chacha. After trying out a couple of different pros for latin I've found a great latin pro too and our first lesson yesterday was excellent. After having a month in limbo it feels so good to be up and running again with two new pros, new routines and we even have a competition in sight. It feels great!

If we really are going to Michigan, I have two weeks to really KNOW all the Rhythm routines.
...
Whee!

The problem is less learning them (I don't really memorize deliberately anyway, just repeat them enough times I learn it) than getting wires crossed between old routines and new. Muscle memory is REALLY strong. Also, NP uses a mix of sylabi but a lot of some come, very clearly, off AM, and ECS espeically makes me want to double over laughing at the goofier figures like those shoulder taps. Whoever thought I'd miss my personal Swing bugbear, the Miami Special?

Last two days, I just went through a Thought Patterns for Higher Performance seminar at work. I'm rather excited to apply what I learned there regarding self-talk, visualization, blind spots, comfort zones, and many more helpful concepts to my dancing.

Yep, I'm experiencing that myself. New latin pro does not use routines, so if he does a particular pattern that my prev pro used, my muscle memory kicks in and says, well we always do this pattern after that pattern. I am having to undo this part... but actually I am enjoying it. It keeps me on my toes, and I am sure I will learn the new way. I'm embracing change!

Just got back into practicing with DP after a few months off of regular practice (he has been working with our coaches on starting up a new studio, yay!), and somehow thing are feeling a lot better, particularly from a lead and follow perspective. I think because we haven't been thinking as hard about our dancing lately, things are kind of falling into place because we're more relaxed and trusting each other more. Funny how that works. Still, we may have just have lost touch with how bad our dancing is since we haven't been critiqued lately, but overall it's nice to see that improvement when I was afraid we'd regress. Something with the connection seems to have really clicked recently.

Getting my first two callbacks in silver latin this weekend! After heavy focus on standard, it is nice to know that my latin is improving as well... just slowly