By Peggy Pollard, Santa Cruz Waltz & Swing, www.PeggyDance.weebly.com
Just as my finger hovered above the “send” button of my dance news email, I quavered. A sinking feeling weighed down my gut like a cannon ball. Wrong! It felt so wrong. I scanned again the Sentinel Omicron news alerts…agonized … texted my dance friends… The first week of January is always our biggest launch of the year. New students jump into classes with five months of Spring stretching out on their calendars. It’s the perfect time for dance dreamers step onto their long-desired path to learning how to gracefully partner dance. For months I’d been planning for this week. But, in a huge disappointment to, well, to the whole world, January 2022 is spent in social quarantine. Again. After our normal December holidays, our dancers are eager to waltz and swing back into our dance hall, whirling face-to-face with a partner around the room, bouncing into tuck turns and arm slides. But NO. It was just not safe. Visions of waltzing Omicron germs floating around my head, I sighed, revised my email, and cancelled our January in-person dances. No, not on my watch will we risk the health of any dancers. Even with dancers fully vaxxed and masked, we must prevent spread of this new super-contagious variant, now causing much global suffering and death. But the upside to Omicron, or, at least to our pausing so many events to prevent it, is that we have been around this block before. Now we’ve learned how to live better at home than two years ago in that first COVID panic. Now we simply slip our masks back on and dust off our familiar shelter-at-home habits. We’ve done this before. So how do we get through it? We get through it together -- online! More and more dancers are experiencing the big value of online dancing during COVID and for the many other reasons they can’t meet in person. Classes now flip easily between in-person, zoom, and hybrid sessions. ONLINE DANCE BENEFITS: Though not as wonderful as feeling your partner’s weight against your arms, online dances are 80% as effective to keep up our dance skills, fitness and spirits. Online dancers can see each other and talk together, encouraging complementing, flirting, cracking jokes. And your dancing is real. While dancing solely in online classes in 2020, Mike says his health improved, he lost weight and was able to cut down on certain medications. Happily, we now have a global proliferation, nay, a Tsunami, of online exercise in many forms. Yet so many online exercise programs feel so… unsatisfying. Some require thousands of $$ to buy a fancy big machine, plus monthly membership fees, all for getting you to do only one, or a few types of movements! Riding a stationary bicycle or lifting weights has limited benefits, not teaching you new useful or creative skills. Fancy videos to pretend you are moving, or a fake person coaching you… mehhh for such expensive tricks. You will soon tire of monotonous virtual routines. Even with real people, the same exercise over & over, especially non-interactive, is boring, NOT satisfying. So which online exercise programs best satisfy our important needs? Ones with: REAL COMMUNITY -- Being online with real people to see and talk with is highly satisfying, for our important human need for social connection. INTERACTIVE -- “Judith,” though highly educated, had never learned how to follow in dancing until our Swing class this fall. It’s a fascinating skill that can be taught, even online to some extent. While online obviously limits physical contact, verbal and visual interaction are still possible. Even some lead and follow dance skills can be done giving simple visual cues. Giggling will ensue. Try it! TEACHING NEW SKILLS -- Many partner dancing skills can be taught online, giving more valuable solo practice time to improve dance agility and enjoyment until dancing in-person again. While any exercise helps our body, our minds are hungry to keep learning new skills, new patterns, new ways of moving, helping prevent Alzheimer’s and keeping our mental cognition strong. Partner dancing is THE BEST exercise for this, says Stanford University’s Social Dance Department Chair, Richard Powers, citing many medical studies. LOW IMPACT – Dancer “Phil” recently fell playing pickleball, with severe injuries. He vowed to me that, as soon as fully recovered, he’s coming back to our much safer, low-impact partner dancing. Partner dancing has much fewer injuries than most other sports. In fact, good dance partners hold each other up, protecting each other from injury. Even online, few activities give as rewarding, SATISFYING a feeling as partner dancing. Face-to-face in harmonious, win-win movement, gives us social satisfaction, even during Omicron, though, hopefully a pause much shorter than last year’s. Ahhhhh This week an undersea volcano erupted in Tonga sending a global Tsunami wave. Our nation is also in a political tsunami. But don’t worry, social dancing solves ALL those world problems. Dancing puts YOU in a happy, healthy state to handle all that life brings you. Dancing is your undersea volcano of joy, sending waves of goodness around your world. But YOUR hardest part is taking that first step. So right now, in our Omicron pause, reboot your exercise life in a satisfying new direction Take YOUR first step now into our wonderful world of ONLINE partner dancing. Your future partners will thank you. Visit www.PeggyDance.weebly.com
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FOOT Notes from Teacher PeggyAuthorPeggy Pollard has been teaching social/ballroom dance in Santa Cruz since 2010. Archives
September 2022
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