I have this need to constantly compartmentalize my life into blocks of time and ideally blocks of productive time. It’s sick, I know, but it helps me get shit done. Every once in a while though, I’ll accept gigs/events and know absolute nothing about the actual event and trust my handsome friends to take care of everything. Let someone else worry about the ‘deets and, “just point me in the dance direction.”

Some benefits of not having to plan everything is that I can actually spend time taking photos and dance geeking out with my friends at these events. Usually at the end of these events, I always promise myself to come back to the basics – dance more, meet more people, have more fun. This summer, with my travel schedule being erratic and the classes/events that I am running actually being semi successful (no way I know!), I find that I am not doing as much “hands-on” dance related activities as I should be doing. So that is what I’ll be doing again for the rest of this summer – training, practicing, learning, sharing. Time to get my hands dirty again. ;-)

Camp Jitterbug is an event held in Seattle with competitions, performances, social dances and workshops drawing a MASSIVE amount of people from all over the country all wanting to learn from the best. They have multiple track levels ranging from Beginners, Intermediate, Advanced, Advanced Plus (Advanced+), and Masters with the latter two requiring auditions. It touts itself as ‘The Awesomest Lindy Hop Event Ever!’ and I am inclined to agree with it.

Since moving back to the west coast, I have been anticipating about re-visiting Seattle to dance again; partially to benchmark myself with my first visit, as well as how I fair dancing with Seattle based dancers.

How did I do? I SUCKED… but it sure felt good.

At the risk of sounding egotistic, it was nice to get away from being one of the better leads of a scene. Some dancers would believe that I’m an advanced-plus lead, whereas I only feel that I am more of a intermediate, maybe advanced, level lead…with potential. I am always undergoing a cycle of improvement with each dance partake. While dancing in Vancouver is great, with good dancers, I feel like there is something missing that makes the dancing great, and that will push me improve, especially because it is in such a close proximity Seattle. Personally, I have found myself social dancing less, and attending more practice sessions in lindy as well as other dances.

Dancing at Camp Jitterbug brought back the experience that I am all too familiar with, yet have not experienced in the last while—being a ‘beginner’-level lead. It was not like this for every dance, but with some of the more well versed followers, even some I have danced with before, I felt like I was a ‘beginner’ dancer all over again.

When dancing, this made me more aware about how much more room I have to grow, and while I might have plateaued a bit, there is so much more for me to work on and this is invigorating for my drive to dance and get better—Cleaning up techniques, paying more attention to musicality, working on swingouts, vernacular jazz, syncopated steps and timing, etc. Being about to experience and watching the competitions and seeing some of the best instructors and dancers competing only helps drive my want to learn and practice more to get to that next level.

Camp Jitterbug was awesome, and I believe that everyone should go to it. It’s quite the experience to get to be at such a large event, and while I never took that classes this year and missed the Jump Session Perforamances, you can be assured that I will be there next year, dancing up a storm and learning from some of the best instructors. I hope that all my friends in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and around the country will join me next year and share in the same experience with me at Camp Jitterbug 2011.

Bring friends to this city.

Gotta love Dublin. There’s so much drinking and dancing in such a small area that one can hardly sit still long enough to realize just how much euro one has really spent (fyi, it was a lot). I was able to fly to Dublin (albeit after a bit of stand-by ticket scare) and attend the Dublin Lindy Exchange to meet some dancers from across the Atlantic. Having never been to Herrang dance camp, it is such a great feeling to meet lindy hoppers from so many other countries in one location having the time of their lives. To be honest, I was a bit nervous about dancing in Europe. I have only ever danced in North America so I did not know if my dance style would mesh well with other dancers. I often get this feeling when out traveling to unfamiliar dance scenes. I always chalk it up to the “big dance pond” syndrome that I self-conscientiously get. The Dublin dancers were great however and were very hospitable from the moment we arrived to the Pillars Room to the very last dance of the weekend.

During the day when not out dancing, my traveling companion, Genevieve, and I did the tourist thing and visited the Guinness Factory tour, risked dismemberment by using the new city bike program, and met up with my good old Irish friend Laura. We also saw some traditional Irish dancing (crazy!) and even did some salsa dancing on the streets (what?) near O’Donnell bridge. Being only there really for three days, I feel that I need to come back at least two or three more times to really feel like I’ve “visited” Dublin. I guess I’ll just have to put it back on the list :-)

In other dance related news, here are two quick events that I am putting on in Toronto:

Teaching A Class Series

In Toronto news, I will be teaching a beginners Lindy Hop class every Tuesday at Dovercourt House starting next week (September 22nd). I’m very excited to have to opportunity to teach this class in Toronto so hopefully it goes well.

Fund Raiser for Hamfats’ Blues Team

The past month or so, I started up a Blues Dance Team to work on some more advance blues dance concepts that I can’t work on the dance floor as well as to compete in the North Star Blues Exchange. We are holding a fundraiser to get us to Minnesota.

Facebook Even Page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=124675049209#/event.php?eid=132311290775

Took a trip to San Antonio to visit Suizo and the fine people at Rackspace and I have never been more impressed by the local population in all my travels. I feasted like a king for every meal and had more patrón than I could ever afford on my own. They even bought us expensive Stetson cowboy hats (see above).

More pictures to come later :)