I know this is a bit late. But I was so busy trying to fix up my blog with other things first.

The first weekend of May, I was up in Penang for a dance competition. There were three dance disciplines in the competition: latin, belly dance, and hiphop. Initially I wanted to bring a hiphop team in for the fun of it… but then after a few practices, my team members decided to pull out for personal reasons. Anyway, we’re not hiphoppers. We’d probably have died on the floor; the other teams were very good.

I took part in the Latin Ladies’ event with Bronya. Actually it took me a while to make a decision on whether we should enter the competition or not. I was actually scared of taking part, mainly because I felt the pressure to do well. Bronya has more than twenty years’ experience of dancing. Me? I only took latin lessons these past two months… and I totally suck at it. Haha. Learning latin made me feel that the past 5 years of doing line dance and freestyle dance was all for nought.

Anyway, we also signed up for Latin Novice under the organiser’s encouragement. The skill levels (Beginner, Novice, Pre-Amateur, Amateur, Professional) are usually reserved for man/lady couples only. Latin Ladies is a unique event which only lady/lady couples participate; this event was created as many ladies found it difficult to get a male partner to dance with (like Bronya and myself).

Because we signed up for two events, I pulled out of belly dance which I signed up for also purely for fun. I wanted to conserve energy for the latin events.

Well… the novice event had A LOT of couples, so much so that the preliminary rounds had to have 2 heats! And guess what, Bronya and I made it to the quarter-finals!! But there was no joy in this triumph. We were not the only ladies-only couple to participate in the Novice; some even had gone as high as Pre-Amateur, and many ladies-only couples managed to get through to the next round. And it was only AFTER the preliminaries that after some complaints, the organiser was forced to announce the disqualification of all ladies-only couples from the non-ladies events. So we didn’t even get to fight in the quarter-finals, even though our number was called.

As for the Latin Ladies… well, we made it to the finals!!!

And we got fourth!!!

Which is not bad for me, being a first-timer!!!

Yay, me. Pats self on back

OK, we don’t have any photos. That’s because we had no supporters accompanying us up there. Not that I wanted any, I was already under pressure as it is, although most of it was self-induced pressure.

And here’s proof: http://www.williamluisa.net/v2/pages/posts/1st-national-ymcas-international-ballroom-hip-hop-belly-dance-competition-pulau-pinang-2009166.php

William is our latin dance trainer and he’s fantastic. If William and Luisa look familiar to you, that’s because they were among the trainers on Malaysia’s So You Think You Can Dance

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Dance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.