Dancing Aims

After dancing last night, I started thinking about what I need to focus on to improve my dancing in the short-to-medium term. Unless I’m *really* enjoying myself I tend to be pretty critical of my dancing anway, but these are probably the three broadest areas I could come up with.

Confidence
I was never a particular confident dancer, in the sense that I get very self-conscious about flashy moves. I much prefer small moves that maybe just me and the lead notice (hence enjoying blues so much). However, it’s become more of a problem since the ankle injury; where I’m a bit rusty still, once I notice I’ve made a mistake it puts me off. Last night I felt like I was on better form than I have been in a while, so at least I’m improving, and a few people have said I’m back to where I was before, but I feel like I still need to put some work in. This is one only I can really fix, so it’s just a case of getting out there and getting over it.

Jazz steps
This is sort of linked to the confidence thing, in that I always feel far more self-conscious when I’m doing something on my own than when I’m dancing with someone (although by ‘on my own’ I also mean breakaways and pauses when I’m dancing with someone). My switches aren’t up to scratch, and in general I don’t feel as in control of my footwork as I’d like. I tend to pick up the rhythms, but not manipulate my footwork to fit quite as much as I’d like.I want to work on improving the stuff I already know first, and revising all the steps we did on the performance team (big apple stuff etc.), then maybe learn some new stuff.

Forward swing-outs
My default swing-out is to go out backwards, and I really enjoy this as it feels somewhat smoother to me than forwards. However, I know there are so many more variations for forwards ones, and I really should be as comfortable with them as backwards. The couple of times I’ve gone to Martin Ellis’ classes I feel like I missed the first 10 minutes because I’m too busy concentrating on remembering to go forwards. At some point in the next month or so I may spend an evening’s social dancing concentrating on forward swing-outs (unless backwards ones are lead, of course) until they become just as natural as backwards.

While these are obviously on my mind, I probably won’t work on them too much at CLX; I’m just looking forward to enjoying myself this weekend, rather than treating it as a practice session. These are to work on over the next month or so at regular events I think. I feel like all of these things are stuff I already know, and can do if I think about it, I just want it to come more naturally.

Dawn Hampton

I just found this on Peter Loggins’ blog:

Dawn Hampton

There is so much more I could say about Dawn; I keep meaning to blog about her, but it’ll have to wait for another day. I suspect she is to me what Frankie Manning is to everyone who was lucky enough to meet him. Suffice to say for now that her class always makes me incredibly happy, and made Herrang this year considerably less painful than it was shaping up to be.

Lullaby

A couple people will know that over the summer I tried my hand at programming. When I was about 10 or 11, my Dad tried to teach me a little BASIC, but I never really took to it. However, seeing how much David enthuses/rambles about Python, I thought I’d try my hand at the basics. I’m never going to get that far with it, as it really is only something I have a go at occasionally, and I don’t really have anything I need it for; it’s just for playing around with.

I therefore introduce Lullaby. At the start of the summer, I came up with an idea for something that would essentially function like a nap-timer; play quiet music for n minutes, then loud music for another period of time. It was essentially a teaching tool; David guided me through the python tutorial with the aim of being able to write the bits for this. I last worked on this at least a month ago, and I’m pretty sure I debugged it (a month seems like a hell of a long time ago). I was planning to play around with the first input to make it a little more user-friendly, but that seems unlikely to happen now. For those people who already know python, this will look breathtakingly simple (or breathtakingly wrong); for those who don’t do programming, it’ll look like gobbledegook. However, hopefully going public with my programming will prompt me into picking it up again.

WordPress is playing merry hell with my formatting; I promise my original is properly done :p I’m playing around with methods of getting it to work. If you have any tips, leave a comment

#imports
import os
import sys
import time

#inputs and calls
def input_seconds():
	"""asks user for inputs and sorts into minutes or seconds. Returns countdown timer in seconds"""
	input = raw_input("Set length of timer")
	#(append h for hours, m for minutes or s for seconds) eg '1h 5m 10s'
	
	input2 = raw_input("Is this minutes or seconds?")
	if 'm' in input2:
		timer = int(input) * 60	
	else:
		timer = int(input)
	return timer
	
def input_playlist():
	"""allows user to choose playlist"""	
	playlist = raw_input("Which playlist do you want?")
	return playlist
	
def play_amarok(timer, playlist):
	"""starts amarok playing the defined playlist"""
	if 'pause' in playlist:
		command = 'dcop amarok player stop'
	else:
		command = 'dcop amarok playlistbrowser loadPlaylist'
		command = command + " '" + playlist +"'"
	os.system(command)
	print "loading", playlist
	sleep(5)
	print "playing"
	next()
	sleep(timer)
	pause()

def next():
	"""plays next song in amarok"""
	os.system('dcop amarok player next')

def play():
	"""starts amarok playing"""
	os.system('dcop amarok player play')

def stop():
	"""stops amarok playing"""
	os.system('dcop amarok player stop')
	
def pause():
	"""pauses amarok
	WARNING: this may not actually work. use stop() instead."""
	os.system('dcop amarok player playPause')

def pause_amarok(timer):
	"""Pauses Amarok for length of time specified in timer"""
	pause()
	sleep(timer)
	play()

def sleep(timer):
	"""runs timer for defined time and counts down"""
	for countdown in range(timer, 0, -1): 
		print countdown,
		sys.stdout.flush()
		time.sleep(1)
	print

def main():
	"""ask for playlist and time, ask whether user wants to include another lot of playlist and time, ask for these inputs and store in a list. Keep asking for inputs until user says they do not want to add more. Once all inputs have been given, play playlists for given times sequentially."""
	
	subsequent_playlist = 'yes'
	pairs = []
	while 'yes' in subsequent_playlist:
		playlist= input_playlist()
		timer = input_seconds()
		pair = (playlist, timer)
		pairs.append(pair)
		subsequent_playlist = raw_input("Select another playlist? Yes/no")
	for pair in pairs:
		(playlist, timer) = pair
		play_amarok(timer, playlist)

main()