Pop Up Silent Disco Steet Mambalsa Meetup and fear!

The Walk of fear to Ally Pally

Another first at Ally Pally

There's a lot of books written about fear. How it can shape our lives and distort out view on the world.
Today I won an important battle with my fear.
My fear was exposing myself to the public as a dance teacher. Of putting myself out there, approaching people.

I've always hated flyering with a passion. To hand out a flyer about me would send me into a tailspin of negativity. I once employed a bubbly girl called Louisa to flyer outside Kings Cross Station. Off she goes with a smile and a carefree attitude. Meanwhile I had to stand at least 20 metres away just to stop the palpitations and sweats. I have tried it in the past outside Farrindon tube. All I could see in the eyes of the disgruntled commuters was 'I hate your intrusion into my space!' Last summer in Edinburgh I help Gary Shaw for a few minutes outside his comedy venue. His company and the idea that if I ever wanted to run a show I need to do this helps me through.

Today I strapped on my Mambalsa Bag and armed with silent disco headphones I strolled up to Alexandra Palace where they hold a farmers market every Sunday. A great place to meet humans! As I strolled the length of the stalls I felt my fear growing and my confidence ebbing. Every person was not right to approach. Too tall, too old, too fat , to disabled, too child-carer-ish!
Get a grip man!! Isn't that the problem? I don't see myself as 'Mr Mambalsa' the dance teacher so I'm not seeing it others.
I get to the end and start to come back. There's a trendy thirty something couple! 1 2 3 and chat.
He's totally not into dance. What I now call a 'Never, Not Now, Not Ever' she did ballet when she was young.  Nice but no dancing Mambalsa for them.
Couple no 2:  She's got Green Hair and not English. 'What dance would you do? .... The Waltz
The Waltz! What century are you in girl! I can't wait for the 1800's to start! You've got green hair and the dance of you dreams is the Waltz!
THE ONLY MUSIC YOU CAN@T MAMBALSA TO IS THE SODDING WALTZ!

Breath.

Arlene moments before we get going!

Two pretty twenty something girls.
Do you dance? 'a bit of salsa'
Where?  'there's a club called Salsa'
I teach there! (you are now in my power!)
Head phones on and our trio is Mambalsa-ing along the stalls! Our own little bubble of silent dance to Uptown Funk.

Yes!

'What was it you were doing?' a stall holder asks. blah blah blah I reply
'My daughters' an artistic directer at the Fringe' chat chat chat
'I'll do it!' next stall holder says who's called Arlene.
Headphones on and pow we're away!
Four approaches and two conversions! 50% !

Recover :-)

It's doable people! Fear beaten for now and so on to the next battle with fear!

Spring Update

There's a bunch of progress to report on the Mambalsa front so here goes:
Edinburgh: The show is approved, and the copy is in the big fat Fringe brochure.
I've titled the show 'Mambalsa- One Man's Quest to Create a New Partner Dance.'
The venue's good and the shows about half written which is only a couple of weeks behind schedule.
I've started performing chunks of it in open mic comedy nights to bring the performance up to scratch.
Accommodation is proving tricky but its not to late to fix.
The silent disco headphones have arrived and I took them out for the first time last Tuesday.
In the middle of my salsa club (Salsa Camden) I danced Mambalsa with various partners to completely different music than was playing in the club. It was good to see the curiosity it provoked and encouraging how ready most were to try it. One lady didn't and I think she didn't know me so there will be more resistance with the general public as the Salsa Camden know me and are already dancers. I need to find the best way of dealing with the 'no thanks'.

What struck me was that there's a simple way to simplify the learning process of Mambalsa.
Call it level one Partner work (working title) - Mirrored  FWS with very few moves. i.e. the minimum needed to dance Mambalsa on the floor.
By empowering the dancers to participate on the floor without any expectation of moves they consolidate FWS and enjoy the dance. Moves come later.
I've just had the idea for the title 'Mambalsa Pow!' Pow as in empowered.
 By using Mambalsa Pow as a snowball exercise ie teach one then get them to show others while you teach the next etc. It becomes social, and proves they understand FWS and Mirroring.

The Dancing in the street idea for the Edinburgh Fringe is to promote the dance and the show in the Royal Mile by approaching the public and teaching them Mambalsa. The goal is to turn a small group of public into a roving demo team who dance and dish out flyers. Think Harri Krishna with headphones.  I'm thinking a lot of branding and sunshine will help this.

Jan Feb 2015 Winter Blues

Saturday morning in cafe Nero before my full day salsa course at bar Salsa.
Yesterday I have a steroid injection into my shoulder. After months of pain  I finally went to the doctor and he said 'frozen shoulder'. Stage one of the fix is remover the pain, three injections monthly should do it then physio to regain flexibility. I'm happy its curable and doesn't stop me doing that much.

what's getting frustrating is the lack of progress in the Edinburgh Fringe show organising. Two applications with P B H are pending. and there's no word for Edinburgh council re the pop up dance classes in the Grassmarket.
more calls next week!
I tried to contact the Big London squares like Broardgate, Kings Cross and Canary Wharf but didn't get a single reply! Try again next week.
The fall back is to go ferel and busk. It's sort of non busking with no exchange of money, no noise just a group of people doing dancing in silence.

Update Feb March 2015
It's looking less and less likely re Grassmarkets. It's just too slow to organise with nothing to suggest it will even work.
Good news re silent disco gear. Because it works on the same frequency as my radio mic , I should be able to use the belt pack transmitters, saving a lot of weight and expense.

Very little interest in the development workshops at the moment. Three problems.
The next one is Mothers Day
Spring is breaking so everyone wants to be
Me! I'm just not pushing it. arrrrrrr

Finnish on an up note.... Every Saturday I'm showing Mambalsa to my 1-Day Intensive Course students. Each Saturday I get that buzz from their ease at getting it and how well it suits anyone's music.

Dec. Katies Party / Dev w/s

It seems a long time ago but in between Christmas and New year I held dev workshop no 3. This was the pilot of the three hour course aimed at groups and companies.
Katie, a school teacher, who has the fortune or misfortune to have her birthday inbetween Christmas and New Year, invited many of her friends and colleagues come along for a Mambalsa experiernce.

After the basics and exercises I developed a performance routine with the group the results can be seen on this clip
note: because of the track we used (sway - Pussycat Dolls)  it may not play everywhere and on every device.
It 'worked' on several levels. Fun, group cohesion, a visual social media clip.
If I had known how useful the performance routine who be, I would have given more time during the w/s to it to achieve a better clip.
Once again Mambalsa proved to be versatile and fun.
enjoy....

KatiesParty: https://youtu.be/z7b1LYHOYHM

Mambalsa Dev w/s #2

Just about recovered from the second Mambalsa development workshop on Sunday 30th Nov.
Sorry if this comes out a s a report but ideas have been buzzing around in my head since the moment it finished.

Notable highs for me were:
People came! and more than the first w/s. It was good to see Fliss and Leigh from London Salsa there both nearly recovered from ruptured Achilles tendons. Yves Salmon popped in to take some professional pics

Everyone leading:
I structured the partner dance exercises so that everyone had to lead and follow.
This changed the dynamic in a very positive way. It appeared that all the experience of the advanced female salsa dancers flooded into the room and a new level of equality and support was found. It felt more like a team than a group of students.
I'm convinced that everyone learning both leading and following skills at beginners level will get more people to a higher level faster than learning one roll first.
It will solve the problem of ladies moving through the levels faster than the men leaving a shortage of ladies in beginners.
It also will mix and mingle the group avoiding the 'them and us' cliques, and even help with outdated attitudes e.g. 'good dancers shouldn't dance with beginners'. It's hard to play the 'dance professor' blame game when your in a teacher to teacher relationship.


Contradance
This was my big idea for this w/s and I'm pleased it was a success.

I could have used English country dance or American line dance but I chose contradance as it connected Mambalsa to the time line of Latin dance (see earlier post). I used a You tube clip of a seventeenth century dance but modified it to get everyone dancing simultaneously and added Mambalsa FWS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjf8vp8_54Y
The next clip shows us our first go at contradance. Don't expect baroque polish! Later in the clip it's beat boxed hip hop and then trance versions of Pachelbel's Canon http://youtu.be/hBpexZYMviY


Bolero

Miranda was there and she's into bolero like me.  Just after we broke for coffee I played "Dos gardenias"  sung by Ibrahim Ferrer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT5cNct4sgE
It felt so easy dancing Mambalsa to bolero which is no surprise as the FWS is almost identical as bolero was the inspiration for Mambalsa. http://youtu.be/xH4OE-ySs0Q

Flash mob
I divided the group into two and set them the challenge of creating a beginners grid. Grid is my term for a set piece pattern like line dancing. There were five people in each group and the creative juices flowed,  different solutions came forth and we selected one and rehearsed a flash mob. (can't wait for next year)

Partner work
My focus was not on partner work but we still did a fair chunk. Two versions of cbl.What was significant was how much easier it was on the second w/s now the terms are familiar to me and most of the group.

Contra-versial 17th Century DJ

Sometimes it's just plain hard to smash through the wall.
I heard sir Bob Geldof on the radio pushing Band Aid #4
It seemed like nothing changed since Band Aid #1  thirty years ago.

Yesterday I made calls...
Edinburgh Dance Base - hopefully to host my w/s - Answerphone
Time Out - to get department to invite journalist - Reception then email
Bashed off a couple of press releases to magazines.

In short nothing to show .... except maybe few cracks in that wall!

This morning I had a mad idea! (another)
What happens if you Mambalsa a 17th Century Contra Dance to urban R'n'B????

OOOOOh
1) choose your Contra Dance style.
First there's lot and lots of Contra Dances, from English folk to Peruvian. Then there's the ones with road cones or is that contra flow? Nothing contra-versial in that joke!
I went for a 17th Century French form "I say, is that Mr Darcy?" .
2) rip out that footwork and replace with Mambalsa FWS
3) Choose awesome track (tba)

Why Contra Dance?
There's a direct link from English Country Dancing to French Contra Dance to Cuban Contradanza to Danzon to Son to Salsa to Mambalsa.

There's a second reason. Group dances including country dances are a successful and enduring form of entertainment. They have always reflected the style and music of their time and place, so taking the music of today and making them fresh again is a valid idea.
The beauty of Mambalsa is that the FWS (foot work sequence) is fixed. Once got the group dance becomes a matter of remembering the shape. Maybe not easy but easier than learning different footwork for each dance.
I recently went to a Ceilidh (barn dance) The dances were simple enough with no real footwork. The crowd was assisted by a cheep bar and live band and we did our very best not to fall over.
It was fun and social and mixed everyone up, but I wouldn't sign up for a course.
If we (the crowd) already had the Mambalsa FWS we would have been far more advanced from the outset with a corresponding sense of achievement. If we could dance those old social dances to modern music, they would take on a new life and connect with a new generation. Another niche for Mambalsa!

Back to hitting that wall :-)

November nerves

It's November 5th Firework night and I'm sitting in a cafe after a filling at the dentist.
This week the nerves have set in re Mambalsa project. It doesn't take much to knock my fragile ego and to be honest I've been waiting for this low bumpy mood to come along for a while now. A cyclical depression or just the onset of winter?
Nothing went wrong, it just feels like I'm wading through mud, towards more mud.

The two words that sum up my progress are avoidance and frustration.
Avoidance is where I find other stuff to do to avoid doing what I need to do.
I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to getting stuck into my accounts. Nothing like a pile of receipts to bury all progress under. And his gravestone read "At least he got his tax return in on time"

Frustration at the moments when I tackle the next item on the to do list and time seems to stretch so it takes forever. Yesterday two facebook events listed and a draft email. WOW.
Not an amazing output by any means but significant in that it showed I  avoided avoidance and went on to be frustrated by frustration.
Avoiding Avoidance is easiest as it's basically using avoidance  to avoid avoidance. I could argue that avoiding avoidance is hard to avoid.
So how do I frustrate frustration?
What seems to work is to stick to the actual. Real things that are real and present in the world, rather than planning and preparation to do real things. 'Today I did' rather than 'Today I prepared to do'.
Things did happen yesterday. Two events got listed. An email was drafted that I had been avoiding since September. A significant Not Nothing.
To day I will do more.
A friend of mine who had spent some time with mental health problems said the best 'to do' list uses half the page to write what you've achieved.

Conclusion- Everything that makes it hard or difficult is part of the reason why no one else has done it!