Pasha's Latin workshop was fantastic. I feel like I learned a lot, and I am so impressed by how genuine and enthusiastic he is. He was a better teacher than I expected. A good dancer isn't necessarily a good teacher, but he knows how to give constructive, specific criticism without letting a class get bogged down. he also has a knack for explaining the same thing in multiple ways, so if you don't understand one explanation, another one will come. He even told us when it's okay to cheat--I'd never done a "bachacata" (a samba step) before and had no chance of doing a technically correct one, but he showed us how to fake it by just stepping fast and wiggling our butts!

He divided the 2-hour session in half. We worked on cha-cha for the first hour and samba for the second hour. Thank goodness Pauline has recently started teaching us samba, or I'd have been utterly lost. For each dance, he taught us a short solo routine. As we learned the routine, he would stop and give corrections and drill us on certain elements; then we would do the full routine and get more corrections. It was such a smart approach: no one had to share partners (as always, more women were present than men) and we all had to focus on cleaning up our own dancing. He worked us really hard on pushing into the floor, engaging our muscles to make our movements more sharp and delineate changes in tempo/energy, and making crisp changes of direction. That doesn't sound like 2 hours' worth of work, but it was. I am exhausted, not just from the physical work (which was manageable, if sweaty) but from the mental work of learning the choreography and remembering the corrections and things he wanted us to emphasize.

I used my camera to take video of Pasha dancing the two routines he taught us, so I'll post links to the videos once I get them uploaded. Right now I'm just waiting for some laundry to finish so I can crash.

dancer1957, whom I've started calling "the Pied Piper," talked to Pasha about coming to the U.L. to do a workshop and he was very enthusiastic about the idea. About 1/3 of the attendees were people from our dance scene in the U.L.--I pointed out to him who we were and explained where we'd come from. We think we could collaborate with Neighboring Town's USA Dance chapter to host him for a workshop; I'm sure we could get 20+ people to come and hopefully he'd be available for private lessons on the same day. dancer1957 got his phone number (!!!!!). He's supposed to be back in Metropolis within the next couple of months and said he could possibly come to the U.L. for one day on that trip. Squee!