What if I ain't no violinist?

51. Twoset Dancers

Eddy entered an old dance hall, much darker and dirtier than the usual ballet studio that he goes to.

"Um, is this the right place for the dance workshop?"

A shorter man with dark hair turned around. He was dressed in baggy tracksuit sweat pants and a hoodie.

"Well, I just got here myself but I think we are in the right place."

"Hi, I'm Eddy."

"Brett. Ballet?"

"Yeah. You can tell, huh?"

Eddy shifted in his loose fitting yoga pants and gym T-shirt.  He thought he dressed "unlike" a ballet dancer today but couldn't fool the guy in front of him.

"Yeah, just your posture. I don't get to meet that many dancers from different genres, this is going to be interesting."

"What's your dance genre, Brett?"

"Hip-hop with break, pop and lock.  And I do some other  bits and pieces as well.."

"OMG. I don't think I'd recognise half of the stuff you do."

Brett grinned.

"Like I said, I hope this gets iNtErEsTiNg."

Eddy and Brett were enjoying some light-hearted chit-chat as more people arrived. Then they heard a voice asking for everyone's attention.

"Okay, can we all gather up please?"

The workshop facilitator introduced himself as John.

"This particular workshop will have you working on dance skits with variations of all sorts. A ballet interpretation of something from a completely different genre of music for example. I've got a collection of songs prepared and I hope you will find it interesting to see how different dancers would move with the music.

So, may I have you guys separate into .... Say three groups. Classically trained, ballet dancers on this side, contemporary dancers stay in the middle, then the more out-there ones like hip-hop on the opposite side."

"Well, nice knowing ya Eddy, I'm afraid we're gonna go our separate ways."

Brett smiled and waved as he walked away from Eddy.

Eddy returned a shy smile as he headed in the opposite direction, where he met 4 people who stood tall in a very similar way. It really was obvious when ballet dancers were standing around.

Once they were separated into 3 groups, John called out.

"Ok, let's all gather up again in the centre to get warmed up. Who would like to do the honours ?"

Eddy glanced at the walls of the studio. The walls did have barre handrails installed. But while he thought the ballet and contemporary dancers could do barre exercises, he couldn't imagine Brett, the hip hop dancer, doing barre work.

"I'll do it. So my usual warm up is okay, yeah ?"

It was Brett who spoke up.

"Great. You got your own music ?"

"Sure do."

Brett whipped out his phone and portable speaker from his backpack and started playing a pop tune that Eddy would have never picked in a million years as music to warm up to. It was some strange pop genre with a very strong bass beat with a lot of rapping and shouting. The other hip-hop dancers cheered but the other contemporary and ballet dancers looked puzzled.

Following the initial slow stretching movements of neck and arms and legs, Brett instructed everyone to do isolation exercises. The first part was fine, Brett was moving his hips side to side, back to front, accenting the movement with the beat of the music. Eddy assumed the next move would be to rotate the hips but instead, Brett instructed them to move their hips to the right, back to the centre, forward, back to the centre, left, back to the centre, back, back to centre. To Eddy, these movements felt pretty weird but doable. Next Brett's instructions were to slowly gyrate the hips clockwise 4 rotations, followed by anti-clockwise 4 rotations. Eddy thought Brett's technique looked relaxed and freestyled, compared to his fellow ballet dancers whom all 5 moved in sync, matching almost every single angle of their hip joint.