This week at Blues Union

This week, Blues Union kicks off Sweet Molasses Blues!  Come for two great classes with Paul Mandel and Amanda Gruhl:

Crazy Counterbalance!
Ever wonder how to create those lovely stretches advanced dancers have?  Want to make those counterbalance moves look and feel great?  This class will show you how to incorporate weight sharing into your social dances in closed and open.  And if we have time, we’ll throw in a few unusual positions!

Blues Connection
The basis for all great partnered dancing is connection!  This week’s beginner blues lesson will focus on how to establish connection, make it feel great, and use it to lead and follow your partner.

DJs will be special guests Jennie Shortway (NJ) and Tina Davis (TX)!

February is our month for working on connection in our intermediate classes! Last week Julie and Shawn focused on connection in close embrace, and this week Gui and Jenn will be going to the other extreme and focusing on connection in open position and breakaway. Maintaining solid, comfortable connection through open position requires a lot of practice and knowledge of momentum and balance, but the big payoff is that you have the most freedom of movement available to you of all of the frames. It’ll be a hard class, but it’ll be worth it!

In our beginner class, we’ll be focusing on the Blues aesthetic. What makes the dance you’re doing Blues dancing? How do you get that 2-AM-in-a-Mississippi-juke-joint look and feel without traveling for a couple of hundred miles and downing a pitcher of beer? We’ll be talking about your posture, your attitude, and your movement and how they all interact to create a solid dance.

Our intermediate classes run from 7:30 to 8:15, and our beginner classes run from 8:15 to 9:00.

Finally, you can look forward to DJs Gui Cavalcanti and Amy Kucharik bringing it to the dance floor!

Hello, hello!

This month we’re going to have a class description for both the beginner class and the intermediate class! Check out what Shawn and Julie are teaching this week:

Intermediate (7:30-8:15): This week, we’ll focus on closed position and close embrace. Learn our favorite tips for leading and following in closed/close, when we like to use this type of connection, and some neat ways you can use this connection to do cool things.

Beginner (8:15-9:00): New to blues? Want to brush up on your basics? Come to the beginner lesson to learn the basics of blues dance, as well as plenty of moves to get you traveling around the room.

After the lessons, John Brooks and Micki Balder will be spinning the night away for us, and Amy Kucharik and Karen Dunham will be bringing food for us!

Hope to see you soon!

Hey everyone! I wanted to let everyone know of a few slight changes in the Blues Union format going forward that we hope you’ll like.

We’re going to be shortening the intermediate lesson and increasing the length of the beginner lesson, so that they’re both 45 minutes. We’ll also be assigning a theme and a track to our beginner lessons, like we do with our intermediate lessons, in an attempt to get our beginners to the point where they’re comfortable participating in our intermediate lesson after a month or two! This means that you’ll now see beginner class descriptions in addition to intermediate class descriptions. It also means that the intermediate class runs from 7:30 to 8:15, and the beginner lesson runs from 8:15 to 9:00.

Starting this week, we’ll also be publishing a one-page brief description of Blues music and dancing opportunities in the Boston area! We’re trying to consolidate information to make everyone more aware of local events like drinking nights, house parties, workshop weekends and exchanges within driving distance (which we consider 6-7 hours max). Handouts will be available with the rest of our fliers at the counter. Feel free to submit events to the newsletter by using this internet form:

http://www.beantownbluesdance.com/submit-your-event-to-the-bluesletter/

In an effort to keep announcements short, we will be restricting speaking time during announcements at Blues Union to events which have either been submitted to the newsletter or have fliers on the counter. The deadline for submitting to the newsletter is 11:59 PM every Wednesday. Thanks go to Paul Mandel for getting this together!

And that’s enough talking out of me. Hope to see you all out on the dance floor soon!

-Gui