Life of a Dancing Engineer

A dancer friend of mine had an extra ticket available to the 7th Annual Boston Tango Festival‘s “Celebrate Tango” show tonight, and I’m very glad I went! All together, there were five of us, four dancers, and one hopefully soon-to-be-convert! 🙂 The annual festival celebrates Argentine Tango, which, for the uninitiated, is very different from […]

What if I could have my own dance studio apartment? I’ve had this idea before – but last night I had a very vivid dream that kick-started my imagination again. 😀 I started by doing google searches for apartments with sprung floors, with very little luck – the only one I found was an expensive […]

I was reading some dance forums today, and I happened upon a thread about the (un)importance of the arts. I couldn’t disagree more with those posters commenting that math and science and practical learning are more important than cultivation of the arts and creativity, and luckily I’m not the only one (towards the latter half […]

Dear Diary, I had a wonderful time tonight! I had a private with Anatoli, which went very well. I told myself before the lesson to not care about doing well, but to just go dance and have fun. To ‘Just Do It!‘ And for the most part, it worked. I danced *much* better than last […]

Dear Dance Diary, I had an amazing lesson today. I danced Viennese Waltz like never I’ve never danced it before! I was actually getting a little bit frightened because we were dancing so fast, and moving across the floor so much with each measure! It put a huge grin on my face, which hasn’t entirely […]

Self Confidence. When I started dancing, I had very little. Looking back, I observe that there was a positive-feedback loop between my dancing and my self confidence. As I became better at dance, I gained more self-confidence, and the more self-confidence I gained, the faster and more easily I was able to make progress in […]

A couple of weeks ago, I read this paper, which talks about Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, as it relates to learning and teaching dance. Since reading that paper, I’ve been thinking a lot about Gardner’s theory, as it relates to my own study of dance. The first thing I realized, was that my primary […]

I wrote this letter to my dance instructor Erik, but after writing it, I realized I probably should have written it to myself, like a diary! So, here goes… My first dance diary post! (Changed ever so slightly, to protect the innocent! 😉 ) Dear Dance Diary, Today my morning Ballet and Jazz classes were […]

I bought my first pair of Ballet shoes on Monday! Well.. That’s not entirely true. I actually ordered my first pair on Christmas day of last year. After a long backorder period, they eventually arrived, more than two weeks late, and more than two sizes too big. When they said street shoe size, apparently they […]

I’ve been watching the videos of Erik and I from Seacoast… I think we look pretty good in many of the dances! Erik & Layla Videos – Seacoast 2010 This is what I thought about each of our videos from Seacoast: m2u00235, this was our first dance, Tango, when we had just run onto the […]