Engineering, as I see it...: Bal bal bal bal!

The past few days have been the All Balboa Weekend in Cleveland (actually independence), Ohio. Four. Days. Of. Balboa! Since no one else from Waterloo was able to to come, I made the trek on Thursday morning up to Toronto to get a ride. Driving, borders, and traffic were all super kind to us and we got in with lots of time for dinner and dancing. Toronto (and surrounding area) dancers progressively showed up until there was a group of around 20 of us. This also happened to be a rather happy boisterous group, so Toronto was definitely present at the workshop weekend. The first night is always great to reconnect with people you've seen previously at dances or to show of the moves you already know so that people will want to dance with you (paraphrased from someone else, I wouldn't have planned something that carefully). Sharing a room with Reesa, James, and Phil, we all went to bed rather early because a bunch of us had level-testing in the morning.

Similar to last year, there are a bunch of circles of dancers for the advanced, advanced plus, and intermediate-advanced trying to bump up to advanced tracks, which require auditions. Having not gotten pulled out of my group, I got to be in the advanced-plus track with Phil, Reesa, and Dongshin. I was really impressed with the overall level of Toronto dancers, with many of them in the advanced track and lots in the intermediate-advanced. Apparently the good bal dancers of our region are only going to get better!

Friday's classes were with David and Teni in the morning and Mickey and Kelly in the afternoon. I found the classes to be at a quite decent pace for both leads and follows to generally get the moves/ techniques. Friday evening was my first ever Jack & Jill (randomly assigned lead and follow), and I don't think it went too badly. Not that I made it through the preliminaries but it was an experience. After more wardrobe changes, there was dinner and then the evening dance. Despite Friday not being the main 'fancy' dance, women are still in dresses and skirts with guys in collared shirts and suit pants. Oh, how balboa is different than lindyhop. The dances that evening were starting to integrate items that were learned during the day's classes and overall people felt a lot more comfortable with their dancing.

Dancing the night before could go super late since there weren't level testing classes in the morning but just the normal sessions. Saturday was the second full day of classes where we had Jeremy and Laura in the morning Andreas and Teni in the afternoon. I enjoyed listening to Laura for her energy while instructing, and I liked Andreas' focus on the stylings of the original dancers (also his red socks with black/charcoal shoes and pants). After the lessons, Reesa and Phil scrambled to get ready for the ACBC strictly balboa competition while the rest of the Toronto people chilled out before the dance. I believe this was the evening where we were what I called "Canadian rude" at the local Middle Eastern restaurant where we were boisterous and silly, fun times. Saturday's dance with the Boilermaker Jazz Band was by far my favourite (though the Mint Julep band was probably more lively) because I had a lot of really fun dances with lots of interesting dancers. Halfway through was the ACBC finals and at 2 am they had the pure balboa competition. This involved very fast tempos and bal in purely closed position, it was pretty fun to watch, though how to do the first round of eliminations fairly when everyone's clumped together is beyond me.

Sunday classes started off slower than the other two nights because people were getting tired and were up late, typical of workshops. But we had Bobby and Kate in the morning which was a lot of fun. Concepts from this lesson were different styles of stepping for bal, and then having the follows teach a new move to the leads who were asked to leave the room. In the afternoon was Chris and Beth from California, which I had not heard of previously. They were an interesting couple where they got us to do a lot of double turn work and arm catches. I thought Chris had some neat slides for the leads which I also tried for myself, why not right?

The afternoon after classes a lot of people napped while some people started to depart. These were times that I was glad I had my laptop because when you're tired, one of the most satisfying things is to flip through cat pictures or imgur with friends. Sunday night's dance was good but I wasn't around for long because I was actually getting tired by then (since I don't sleep or nap much). I managed to get the last few dances with people that I was hoping for, and starting saying goodbye to people that I probably wouldn't run into the next morning. Since Reesa and James left on Sunday, I migrated to Stefan, Amanda, and Johanna's room (along with Rob from Kingston) for the night. There was enough space so I didn't need to take the bathtub.

Monday morning I finally made it out for the run I was hoping for since Friday was level testing, Saturday and Sunday my feet were tired and not feeling like running. I headed east on the main road (similar to Hespeler road in Cambridge) since there was a nice big hill that I remember from driving around with Stefan and the crew on the first day. At the bottom of the hill there was a trail (apparently called the Towpath Trail) that followed a canal and river, so I followed that south past several locks and a waterfall. I returned to the people in the room waking up so the obvious thing was to excitedly tell them of my adventures and the pretty spot I found in Independence. Actually, it wasn't Independence, it was the adjacent city, Valley View. Even the city signs are old-timey whitewashed boards.

Overall, a very excellent weekend. Great friends, learned lots, and kicked my balboa fanaticism into overdrive. :)