Alvin Alley Dance Class
I had been looking forward to the dance class at Alvin Alley for some time, mainly because I had no idea what to expect. I assumed we’d all have fun embarrassing ourselves, and it appears as if we did. I knew it was a primarily African-American founded dance company, but I never made the connection that we were going to do African dance until we arrived.
Participating in a class like this (which, by the way, was my first dance class) allows you to further appreciate dance, because you are forced, for an hour and a half, to live like a dancer. You are forced to make some of the same motions that they do when you watch them in a performance. And I learned and noticed so many things about dance that I hadn’t noticed before. First, as I said in the follow-up discussion after the class, it’s amazing how you can naturally become synchronized with twenty other people in the room. You understand that you have to move at the exact same speed and in the exact same way as everyone else, but you can’t look at them to make sure. When you’re performing, you just have to know that you are in sync with everyone else up there. And it’s amazing that, as Louis said, by the end of it, we were all in sync without even putting in any active effort in trying to be in sync. And the interesting thing is the dance instructor allowed us to get in sync with each other at our own pace. He knew we weren’t going to do it perfectly the first time, so he didn’t say anything. He respected that we were novices, but felt that we were capable enough to eventually synchronize with each other.
Late that night, I went to dinner with some friends (at this really good Moroccan restaurant/lounge in the East Village called ZERZA). I told one of my friends, who I hadn’t seen in four months, that I had taken an African dance class that afternoon. She said she had taken African dance classes in the summer, and she remembered that she was extremely sore the day after taking her first class. Now, she is an experienced dancer, but she probably wasn’t doing anything much more rigorous than what we were doing in our first class. I said to her, “I don’t think I’ll be sore. I didn’t feel like I was overexerting myself or sweating profusely.” She said, “Neither did I. It felt easy, but then the next day, I was really sore.” I was wondering if anyone had a similar experience to the one that my friend had the next day. I personally didn’t feel anything the next day, but did anyone else? I’d be curious to know how the dance class physically affected everyone’s bodies.
November 13th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
that’s me, Sean, btw, who published the last post