It’s a good thing you get to stamp in flamenco dancing

There are few things as humbling for a dancer as starting to learn a new dance genre which is completely unfamiliar to you. If you ever start thinking "I've got this" as a dancer (as if that could ever be possible!), try this. I am a ballroom and Latin American dancer and joined an adult beginners’ flamenco dance class earlier this year. These past four months I have come to view the amount of stamping in flamenco as a blessing, because even if I was not supposed to do it, I would still be stamping in frustration! Muscle memory can be a blessing and a curse. All dancers know how wonderful it is when your body just knows what to do when the music starts. But we also know how hard it can be to change a movement when your body has become used to it. It doesn’t help that the rest of the class all look at me like I should know what I’m doing. I am a dancer, after all. And some things do come more easily. Standing upright with upper abs and core muscles engaged, shoulders pulled back and down – you got it! Keeping my elbows up and my shoulders down as I lift and lower my arms – sure thing! But then I need to do things a bit differently and my carefully-trained body becomes my enemy. Rotate my wrists outwards? Easy! Rotate them inwards? Uhm, yes, give me a moment… I can do a single or double turn easily and spot while doing so, but ask me to settle onto my back foot after completing a turn and I’m stymied. In Latin dancing, you see, we keep our weight forward and usually shift onto the front leg out of a turn. Something as simple as placing one foot slightly angled in front of the other becomes a nightmare as my distinctly Latin habit of placing the front foot on the very tips of my pointed toes surfaces. Placing the entire ball of the foot on the floor is apparently impossible. And believe me, standing there with the tippy-toe of your flamenco dance shoe on the floor just looks odd. Have you ever tried pointing your toes in flamenco shoes? I would not recommend it. I have spent years learning to walk toes first in Latin shoes, stroking the floor with pointed toes as my feet pass. Most of my shoes have scuffed tips from unconsciously doing the “Latin walk” in normal shoes. It’s all fine and good … until there are nails in the soles at the front of your shoes. My sincerest apologies to the studio where I gouged furrows in the floor by digging the toes of my shoes – nails and all – into the floor instead of stamping with the entire surface of the ball of the foot. But don’t expect a last “olé!” from me any time soon. In dancing, there is always hard work behind the fun and the beauty. Despite all the stamping in frustration, the new techniques are already enriching my dancing in general. And even more importantly – I am having fun! It is fun learning something new without any pressure to be great at it. It is satisfying to challenge myself and fun to laugh at myself when I get it wrong. But I am starting to get it right sometimes and for me, nothing beats that feeling when you get it right.