Harvest Moon Melee, day 1

It’s the break between classes and the evening dance, the completion of the first 24 hours of the Harvest Moon Melee in Nashville, TN.  The one thing I hate about competition centered weekends is the lack of social dance time, because even when it’s time for social dancing, many of the competitors are actually working out final details for the upcoming comps, or busy nursing the bruised egos from the previous competition.

Last night was tons of fun, apart from the not enough social dancing time (which for me is also attributable for an hour at Waffle House and then an “early” trip home from the late night).   The evening opened with the Showcase (team routine) division. There are 7 teams here: Big George Savoy Bouncers (Atlanta, GA), Knoxvillians – though they insisted on the pronunciation of Knoxvillains (Knoxville, TN), Swing Blade(s of Glory) – the location of the parentheses is paramount (Nashville, TN), Whitey’s Cindy Loppers – which I think is the best name here (Nashville, TN), Orlando City Dippers – OCD… hehehe (Orlando, FL),  Tiny Bunch (Atlanta, GA), and last but not least – Stomp House (Raleigh, NC).

I’ll get into to routines more once they are posted on YouTube, but everybody brought “IT”! They were all great and they all displayed their teams quite well. Whitey’s Cindy Loppers was by far the most fun and entertaining with their review of the 80’s.

After the Showcase was the Charleston Jam, which unfortunately didn’t really get to truly jamming tempos until near the end. The fault I really found with the tempos was not simply because the songs were slower and so really rocking out was difficult, but because there were so few round in which to dance. On our team for one, not everyone even got to dance because there just weren’t enough rotations because the songs were so slow that a half hour went by with not enough 8 counts. This is not to say that there weren’t poignant moments, there were some spectacular dances during this jam.

The final event of the evening was the Sudden Death Social Dance Competition Challenge. I really liked how the organizers pulled this one off. They did it Jack and Jill style in that partners were randomly paired. All the competitors got a number in their packet. You danced with the other person who got the same number, and each number was given a heat to dance in. Last night was only the prelims and it was 4 heats of 3 songs danced all skate (I wouldn’t want to be the judges). Finals will be tonight and will be jam style.

Classes today were great. I taught a beginning class with a helper (Kristy White) who I’d never gotten to teach with before. It was quite fun and the class went well. Then I jumped in on the performance track and was able to catch a class with Bobby and Kate who are always terrific and have great material. The last class was aerials with Jill and Kerry and that also went quite well.