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Dallas Bachata Festival.
The next 2 days passed in a blur of dancing, lessons and very little sleep, as you'd expect from any self respecting congress!! Some highlights include our 2 private lessons and the shows. Our 1st private lesson was with Jorge Contreras at 6pm on Sat 15th. We met Jorge in Alaska where he taught at the Festival and really liked his style back then, we also joined in one of his weekly lessons when we went to LA which was really good and much more advanced than anything we get at home. Again we really liked his style of dancing and he teaches very well so as we knew he'd be at Dallas we pre-booked him for a lesson. After watching us dance he spent the lesson picking up on all our little faults and fine tuning our dancing until I felt I was dancing with someone else! It was weird, I was dancing with Andy but we were both so much better that I was able to tune into and follow much better than ever before! Definitely money well spent :) Our other private lesson was with Ivan and Eva from Spain and although there was a bit of a language barrier it was probably the best lesson Ive ever had. They've been dancing and teaching Kizomba for years, before most of us in the UK had even heard of it they were already masters!! Again we danced first, but this time with them instead of each other and once more they worked on our technique going right back to basic stuff, but what a difference it makes! The other thing I really wanted help with was the kizomba body movement...Ive always been able to do it while I'm stood on the spot, but as soon as I start to dance I lose it...Eva showed me exactly how the mechanics of the movement worked and I realised they were the complete opposite of what I'd been doing to create the same effect! So after much patience on her part I could eventually do it whilst moving...this is something I can practice as I still find it hard to concentrate on doing that at the same time as the hundred other things I have to think about when following...its much more than closing your eyes and letting the man move you about!! This lesson was at 6-7 and near the end a few people came in to wait for the semi-private lesson Ivan and Eva were giving due to popular demand. As there was space for 10 couples and only 4 showed up we decided we could cope with another hour and a half of kizomba and so paid the extra to join in. We did about 45 mins when Ivan was informed that some couples who wanted to take part hadnt shown up because they were still in the lap dancing class that was taking place upstairs so he said what we'd just done was a freebie and he'd start the lesson again upstairs in a few minutes when the others were also free! So upstairs we went and after a further hour and a half we were pretty braindead having taken so much information in and concentrating so hard on trying to implement everything we'd learned. I was happy though as when I asked Eva if I was getting the kizomba movement she laughed and said yes, it was there but very small but that that was the most important thing and now that I had it I could just work on making it more obvious. So we were happy with our lesssons and the lessons throughout the congress were good too with good variety of styles, dances and teachers. I have to admit it was definitely the best run congress we've been to in the states and is right up there with ones like Scotland just on a smaller scale. I would say the only downfall was that the guy organising it needs to learn to delegate jobs to other people...he started teaching a class by saying he didnt know how he was functioning as he'd only had an hours sleep in the last 48! His lesson was taught well, but we were very bored as it was very basic compared to what we'd been doing in other lessons and yet strangely it seemed to take ages for people to get it! One other thing we liked about this congress apart from the fact that it ran on schedule and on time was that they kept the shows to a minimum only having 4 or 5 a night. This was great because you then really appreciated each one and they didnt blur together through boredom and frustration at not being able to dance. Basically Dallas was everything New York was not and I would definitely recommend anyone to go there, especially as its only $100 for a full pass!!
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