Coptic storms & Dolphin reels

Another two weeks have flown by. Our weather has been hot, hot, hot, now it's cold again and the winds are blowing strongly, as they tend to do around this time of year - but despite the evidence of sahara red sand over everything, suggesting a desert origin, the temperature is closer to arctic. However that isn't a problem when we are dancing - the cooler the better since we are generating a fair amount of heat ourselves! The Monday class has been well attended and working hard. Despite the usual fun & laughter, people are getting more and more confident, with their reels of 3 especially, and this week we tackled Pelorus Jack - the 'dolphin' dance; we practiced the scary sounding 'alternating tandem diagonal 1/2 reels of 3' around chairs initially and then sailed (or should it be 'swam') through the dance.
Tuesday evenings continue to be enormous fun too. Last week we welcomed another intrepid solo visitor - keen to join in and so obviously enjoying it all that when she's back in the summer I know we'll see her again. This week we celebrated a birthday - tucking into some fabulous cake- brought for us all to enjoy by the lovely birthday girl. We also tackled some challenging dances - none of them completely new to the class but unfamiliar to most of our current dancers because it's a while since we've done them. With cake on the horizon, concentrating on a new and challenging dance was the last thing people felt like doing, but once the music stopped and the dance was done, the beaming smiles showed that despite their misgivings it was worth it. Even with a cake break, a couple of renditions of Happy Birthday and some serious learning curves, we fitted in every dance on programme and as a birthday celebration it was declared hard to beat. As the helpers returned the room to it's normal layout, discussion around how to organise having a birthday to celebrate every week was only partly tongue in cheek!

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