Swing lesson 10 | Werribee

(Wednesday nights at Werribee Kindergarden Community Room)

I know what you’re thinking – what the hell happened to Swing Patrols Yarraville and Brunswick right? Of-course you are! A few entries ago you may remember the lecutre I attended Thursday night which kept me from Loz’s debut as temporary teacher for Yarraville – Sorry Loz! As for Monday, well, it was Melbourne Cup day yesterday (Tuesday), and Bridie O’Rilly’s had a Cup-eve function booked in the space where we swing, so it was no-go for the venue. For all of those that don’t know, the Melbourne Cup is a horse-race. Yeah. Nothing to be excited about other than the abuse of horses – I’d like to see a race where the jockey carries the horse two miles…

So it’s been a whole week since I’ve had a good swing!
As usual, the Werribee class and the wonderful Celia and Daniel were awesome. A quick revision of six-beat tripple-steps to refresh everyone’s memories, then straight into the send-out (leads front-replace) to open position.
From here we learnt a cool pass-by where the lead swings the follow past their right-side and catch her right wrist with his right-hand but stays facing the same direction. The lead then front-replaces again and pulls the follow forward so that she springs with her first tripple back in-front of the lead, lead changes hands again so we’re back to standard open position. We then changed to cross-hand and did a standard block and release push-turn, then did this funky thing where you go to guide the follow into a turn, but catch their arm with your other hand, a bit of a side-to-side movement! We did this with alternating hands three times until we let follows finally spin back into standard open position where we finished for the night.

Celia and Daniel are so cool!
Celia is cooler though, but only because she’s a girl and at the moment none of us are good enough to dance Jack’n’Jacks yet, and anyway Daniel might not be up for it XD but Celia always social dances with me after class and teaches me things – it is the most awesome fun and I wish it could go on for ever! I generally don’t always retain it all straight away, but when the next lesson rolls around she gets me to try the moves and they begin to stick.
We had one or two new faces again, but everyone else is getting quite good, and everyone’s having a lot of fun. Some people who really had to concentrate in past lessons are beginning to smile and look up now, really getting into it and playing around with little bits of flare in their phrases. There are one or two follows who have to constantly watch Celia and Daniel or a neighbouring couple to follow along, but that’s totally cool and they almost always end up trusting themselves by the end of the night.

Officially now, if I could change the universe, I would do away with my need to eat, sleep, and work for a job, and learn and dance Swing for the rest of eternity.