I'm at my friend Andrea's house for last night and tonight. That meant that I didn't need to travel back to San Francisco from Palo Alto for two nights. I went to the Palo Alto farmer's market and bought some sablefish/ black cod/ butterfish, and now I'm eating it (them?) with other goodies. I've been trying all new types of mushrooms since arriving in the northwest, but fish was the thing i really planned to learn about. Unfortunately, I haven't found a great fish market in Portland yet. However, the farmer's markets stock good stuff.
The Stanford dance weekend just finished its class portion, and the historical dance week begins tomorrow. This weekend I learned the cha-cha, cross-step waltz with variations, the night club two step, salsa, and some Edwardian Steampunk dances. The last one may leave you, the reader, as confused as I, the student, was. Essentially, these are dances from the Edwardian era (about a ten year period of time) at the turn of the 20th century. These dances are then performed by dancers and at dances with a Steampunk theme. The natural question follows. And no, i can't quite answer it. It's something part fantasy, part aesthetic, part fiction, much imagination, a little attitude, and maybe one of you can tell me a little more. A quick google search resulted the image above. I think I'll leave it at that.
The class on Edwardian Steampunk was taught by Richard Powers, the person running the week here. The way that class was run was particularly interesting. In one hour, we learned 5 full dances. Many of them used similar footwork and rhythms, but it was a lot for one class. This class did not emphasize technique or move combinations - it was rather meant as a social experience. It was accompanied by brief history and explanation of Steampunk, which itself was meant as encouragement to spread the culture and hold your own Steampunk Ball. It was like no other dance class I've ever taken, and that brings me to the whole experience of dancing in this community. Most dance communities that I'm a part of stick to 1 or 2 dances. Lindy/ balboa, tango, blues, etc. This community prides itself on dancing everything. The playlists are seemingly itunes on random, and all the while, people do whatever they might to get around the floor - waltz, polka, one-step, mazurka... This is more in line with the dancing of the American dance era, where each song or set of songs would be announced (foxtrot, swing, waltz...), and it makes for a different sort of social experience than I am used to.
For a long time, I've felt something missing in my dance communities - this applies all over the world - somehow it seems that when the communities' focus on one dance, we tend to lose our understanding of dance as a social phenomenon. We try to master the basics and fundamentals. We struggle to be the best at one particular thing, but we often lose the spontanaeity (and in my mind, the spirit) that is inherent in social dance. The dances go down one track, techniques become specialized for that dance, no one wants to dance anything but that one thing. When we dance multiple dances, we lose the security of feeling proficient at our one dance. We are left with a partner looking for a nice time and some music. Something completely different arises from that situation, and it is this that I call the heart of social dance. It is making due. The old saying is "the best of anything is what you have." I think that when we can truly embrace this concept, we can find the purest state of social dance.
Anyways, social dance is alive and well in Palo Alto.
