Oakland Swing Dance Festival 2005 Journal
So much to write about, so little time.

So we are more than freshly back from the Oakland Swing Dance Festival 2005 (organized by Paul and Sharon: http://www.paulandsharon.com ). We put up our photo gallery last week-ish. And now here is the OSDF 2005 Journal.

By the way, you can Click Here to visit our OSDF 2005 Photo Gallery.

Overall we had a great time. We always do when we travel ... I'm not sure if that necessarily means if it's because we particularly enjoy traveling for dance or because we're just really easy to entertain. Anyhow ... we had fun and encourage everyone to check it out. Great blend of instruction and social dancing. I would have liked to see the levels kept a bit more in line. That being my only (and minor) complaint, I'd say it's a safe bet we'll be back next year.

Without benefit of the schedule in front of me, here is my (our) OSDF 2005 memoirs:

It started out with something Sheri and I rarely do and that's fly up to Northern California. We figured we'd be a bit too tired Sunday 6pm to drive back. THANK GOODNESS TOO BECAUSE WE WERE WIPED OUT!

Okay so we arrived about early morning, just in time for our hosts to wake up (Steve and Heidi) (who by the way were wonderful hosts!)

Now, we got in to Oakland early to either 1) sleep, or 2) walk around. And of course what do we do? Well, we did get a nice lunch (dim sum!) followed by Sheri getting a nap while I ended up most of the afternoon playing with Heidi's computer and fixing up a few things on it and before you know it dinnertime rolls around.

I also was quite enthused to see a 7-11 within walking distance (I'm a 7-11 junkie!) but for some reason never got around to getting there until the last day.

So after an afternoon of playing on Heidi's computer, Dinner rolled around and I think Heidi cooked for us. One night she cooked, the other night we went out. Anyhow, from what I remember this is the night Heidi made us dinner and it was SUPERB! That gal got some cooking skills. And then we were off to our first OSDF!

We were fortunate to get there in time to attend Dawn Hampton's special session. This is the first time I got a good chance to listen to her and the second time I got to watch her dance. The first time I saw her dance was I believe back at ALHC in 2003 (?). At the time I was impressed with her dancing more because I figured that's quite a lot of movement for someone who is an old-timer.

So either she got better or I am more discerning with my eye ... but in her demo with Manu Smith I was floored. I could visually see the way she was feeling the music in her soul. And saw that even though her movements were small, they were VERY distinctive and subtle yet really clear. I have yet to even perfect being able to make my bigger movements so defined and distinctive, much less making my very small movements so distinctive and soulful. For any of us who have worked on this, you know how really difficult this can be. And here I was watching Dawn and she was just gorgeous.

*sigh*

Then the dance started and though we weren't too inspired to dance, we got to catch up with a few of our No.Cal dancing friends: most notably Bill and Kay. And quite a LindyGroove contingent showed up also. (Not just So.Cal, but "LindyGroove" So.Cal). There was Lance, Vicki, Jen N., Karen S, Debbie (of course), me, Sheri, Shaheed, and Alina. Lance a.k.a. "Mr LindyGroove" was in particularly fine form. The DJ'd music was pretty good. Not great personally for me, but I had a lot of fun. It was good also to see Jason Christodolou (even if I probably misspelled his name). It was definitely good seeing him again and I was looking forward to watching him teach.

What was also fun was seeing performances by some of the various troops in SF including my personal favorite SF Bounce (mostly because of Kay). Kay had introduced me to various members and I really like them a lot, including "The Fabulous Defazzio" (the girl in green on the far right and back) and later Heidi (front in pink). Kevin and Carla's team also performed which was a trip because, well, they all danced and dressed like Kevin and Carla. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I had flashbacks to our wedding when our friends came out wearing "Ben" and "Sheri" masks.

We skipped out on late night and went back home to "sleep early". Of course after getting in our jammies we headed downstairs to say goodnight to Steve and Heidi and ended up staying up an extra two or three hours chatting (I think I fell asleep during part of this), finally hitting the very comfortable guest bed at around 3:30am.

Saturday was a lot of fun... that's why I usually prefer camps over exchanges because of the teaching as well as the dancing. I was disappointed in the level restrictions of the class. The classes were pseudo-tracked in that there were levels assigned to each class but no auditions were needed so class-hopping was okay.

I had heard at previous OSDFs Paul and Sharon were more strict on the levels of the classes. However in doing so the advanced class had too few people. So I was curious how this was going to turn out.

What happened this year was that there was no regulation on who could attend what class. This is definitely a bummer in the classes I was looking forward to for advanced stuff (especially Steven & Virginie advanced classes). I would have been happy even if the classes were relatively advanced (meaning advanced relative to all attendees) but it's just disappointing trying to practice all the great concepts when strict beginners rotate in on a regular basis.

That being said, I hope next year there is some sort of regulation. Either that or else not assign "levels" to the classes. Either way, I still had a lot of fun because I also learn a lot about teaching by watching the great teachers teach. So all in all I was still very happy about the classes.

We took from the fabulous Steven & Virginie, Jason & Sylvia, Elliott and Katrine Balls To The Wall (one of my favorite classes!), and more Jason and Sylvia. We also got a lunch break where we actually did some work together with a few other great folks up there: Steve, Heidi, David Graybill, Debbie, and Nicole (don't remember her last name).

Not to mention it was a really nice day and hangout time was nice. This is one of my favorite pics with three wonderful gals: Natasha, Debbie, and Sheri (Sheri is especially one of my favorite gals

Dinner with Steve and Heidi was excellent again. Followed by a bit of dress up and our second night at OSDF. This time Barbara Morrison was playing and THEY WERE ON FIRE! I haven't felt that inspired to dance for at least a few months. It was awesome and I got plenty of good dances in. Not to mention the other great reason for attending these workshop weekends is having the opportunity to dance with so many of our best dancers and teachers. I was especially looking forward to dancing with Virginie and the incredible Ms. Dawn Hampton.

My dances with Dawn were quite inspiring. At first I thought the reason her movements were kept so small and subtle was because she was fragile (you know, being an old-timer). So as I was leading her to the floor for a dance I was thinking, "Yeah, this will definitely force me to listen to the music" (because I wasn't expecting to do swingouts or turns with someone so fragile and brittle).

Well, first off the dance was just plain fabulous. Dancing with her really made me feel all the subtle movements she was doing and tuned me in better with the music. But the big surprise came when I did a few singouts and WOW she is a STRONG woman. She definitely is not brittle. When I did swingouts with her she really gave me a tremendous amount of connection to the point where I felt like I could do swingouts over 200bpm quite comfortably with her. Her connection was that strong and reactive. Which means that her subtle movements are not a limitation of her physical prowess. Sothough she is capable of the strong connection for big movements she can also somehow keep it small and refined. That really awoke me up to the fact that my body movement is just years behind and there is so much to learn.

*sigh again*

Of course my favorite dancers were with Sheri. Sheri ended up with a really busy night too and she was very much on fire. So sufficed to say we had one of our better nights dancing. And when we dance when both of us are having one of those better nights, it's just PG-13 orgasmic. We even pulled out the Eric-Fenn-Inspired Robot!! (Well, Eric probably would not want his name attached to that... oh well).

Oh, and Heidi was also fabulous to dance with. Interesting thing I realized is those who are really good in Bal or Lindy tend to suffer a bit on the other dance. Even with Sylvia Sykes sometimes I feel like I can tell what she's been teaching more of lately. So one thing I have noticed as I dance with Heidi more is that her Lindy is really consistently good. I'm not a good enough Bal dancer to know if her Bal suffers (I imagine not considering that they teach so much Bal). So I was surprised at how groovy her Lindy could be too. Definitely one of my favorite people to dance with that night. So major props to her although when she and Steve tried to do our robot ... yeah, not even a contest ours is better.

Saturday night we again skipped out on the late night party. We had a lot of fun at the dance and were pretty wiped out and needed to conserve. So again logically that means we get in our jammies, go down to say goodnight to our hosts, and end up on the couch until 3am talking.... (and again this time I crashed during the conversation .. I think for much longer this time). The only thing I remember is everytime waking up and seeing Steve and him asking me, "You sure you don't want to get to bed bud?"

And something about me doing some sort of slap-lead on Heidi's forearm... that was another topic of conversation I was a bit too out of it to remember.

The next morning we did Yoga (wow we are not flexible!) and then I went off to Paul and Sharon's Q&A class which definitely was good. We covered a lot of topics including state of the teaching community, tips on teaching, etc. . It was a nice change to just sit and talk. Paul simply puts it this way: "Yeah, for the first and last class of the day for some reason we seem to schedule SOYA classes (pronounced SOY-YUH) ... that's SOYA as in 'Sit-On-Yo-Ass' classes". Sheri took Virginie's Body Movement class which Sheri thought was simply amazing. Definitely a good start. We also worked during lunch with our team folk (Steve, Heidi, Debbie, David, Nicole). Followed by David and Debbie's "Happy Feet" class! That was something I had been looking forward to also since I knew they would be teaching some Carolina Shag and the class went really well. A lot of people enjoyed it including one woman who said "My feet can't stop moving! They're so happy!".

Oh by the way, as a teacher Debbie got her own parking spot! Cool! (She had no car, but she had a parking spot. I told her she should get a little chair and sit in her spot and have a refreshment or two).

We finished the day with Paul and Sharon's SOYA class in musicality. This was pretty good but I think I was too tired and ended up falling asleep during part of it. Which means I definitely would not have been in shape to take an actual class class. Either way, this was it and we had to rush off to the airport (Heidi took us .. they were definitely the perfect hosts).


And that's the story of OSDF 2005. Overall, again besides my minor complaint on the levels, we had a lot of fun both social dancing and learning and just hanging out with friends. I would definitely go again.

And this time I'll hit the 7-11 a bit more too.

Did I mention that not only was there a 7-11 within walking distance to Steve and Heidi's BUT there was also one right next to the Lake Merritt Dance Center!

HEAVENLY!