One of my other questions to Leif on that my first day concerned the opportunity to involve myself in dancing in the area. While not being naturally endowed with any particular grace of motion, I have always been a rather active (I prefer this term as being more fitting than "athletic") person. When I first began my journey at Princeton I was enamored by the multitude of both dance and a cappella groups on campus, and purposed to get involved with both during my time there. I had no previous dance experience (the closest I had come was a couple of years of gymnastics as a young child and swimming lessons throughout my youth, culminating in two years on the high school swim team), so I had little chance of making it onto any of the audition-only dance squads, however, there were still several opportunities for which I needed little skill. I immediately sought to become involved in the Ballroom Dancing club, and attended beginner lessons sporadically for the first semester. However, there are nearly always more females than males in beginning dance courses, and the frustration of being repeatedly left without a partner (not being aggressive enough to snatch one of the few boys who did dare to attend) finally caused me to throw in the towel until I found a partner. This I thought I had managed in the person of Alex, a wonderful friend of mine who was also president of the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship (and a fine catch in the opinions of most of the female membership of the group). Alex is a gentleman in the traditional sense of the word, and a staunch defender of all things manly (including bacon, Lord of the Rings, bacon, swordfighting, and bacon, to name a few). Thus it came as little surprise to me that he was also highly interested in learning the fine (and very manly) art of ballroom dancing. I extracted a promise from him at the end of my freshman year to be my dance partner in the fall, and went off to my summer adventures quite content. We were foiled in this venture, however, by the unfortunate scheduling of beginner lessons on Friday evenings during Princeton Evangelical Fellowship's weekly assembly. The president of the organization couldn't very well abandon the group meetings to go dancing, so though we managed to attend a few "makeup" lessons scheduled throughout the week, we were never able to attend regularly enough to feel anything other than embarrassed and unqualified. However, it was in the fall of my sophomore year that I discovered the Princeton Swing Dance club which met weekly on Wednesday nights for lessons and free dancing, and fell in love. Not only was this dance more free and rhythmic than the strict technique of ballroom dance, it was created to be danced to jazz music, which is one of my favorite genres. One of my main challenges came with the spontaneous nature of the dance, which clashed firmly with my controlling, OCD, Type A nature which wants to know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing every moment so that I can know that I'm doing it well. However, after much (sometimes agonizing) practice I learned the art of relaxing, enjoying myself, and listening to the guidance of my partner, and with a good enough lead I can actually appear to be (though it may be only an illusion) a reasonably skilled dancer. Several months before my boyfriend and I started dating, I began dragging him along to swing dance (not unwillingly, but reluctantly as he was shy to be "not as good" as the other dancers there). I, in my turn, accompanied him to Contra and English Country dances as frequently as our busy Princeton schedule would allow us to attend them. I had discovered the local country dance group which hosted these dances when they came during OA Leader Orientation Week, prior to the Orientation camping trip which I helped lead, to host a Contra dance as entertainment for the leaders. The August air lay hot and muggy inside the gym, but heedless of it, we danced our hearts out until the sweat poured down our faces and backs, and I fell in love with the energetic, nearly frantic pace of Contra dancing. Unfortunately their weekly events are also held on Wednesdays, in direct conflict with Swing, but they occasionally also have Saturday dances which we can attend.
So I was looking with some reluctance towards my summer which I saw as being quite empty of dancing. I was in luck, however, because another member of the Princeton in Munich program was a much more avid swing dancer than I, and I have already detailed to you how she dug up several swing dance events for us to attend while we were in Munich. I scoured Google for similar opportunities in Clausthal, but I think this town is just too small for that kind of young city-dweller type of activity. Nonetheless my sharp eyes had not failed to notice the shirt that Leif was wearing on the day he picked me up from the bus station and how it had the logo and name of a dance group emblazoned upon it. Therefore I asked with a great deal of hope after opportunities for dancing in the area. Leif informed me that he was a former ballroom dancer and instructor himself, but my previous experiences with ballroom led me to only smile nervously at the prospect of trying to learn this strict art in another language. Then Leif mentioned, with a slight tone of disdain that I could hardly blame him for in his position, that there was a Square Dance group in the neighborhood. I, in his words, "ausgeflippt" (seriously, that's the German word for "flipped out" ;D). Not a minute later he was behind his desk typing furiously on his computer, and very soon he pulled up the website for the Harzer Country Dancers. He pointed out to me that they met weekly, on Mondays, having first one hour of square dance lessons, then one hour of line dancing, and concluding with an hour of hearty square dance. I was very eager to join in this most American of pastimes and somewhat assumed that my few experiences of square dancing (the annual PEF Hoedown and a square dance on a family vacation two summers prior) would be sufficient to keep me afloat in a dance which I imagined consisted mostly of "bow to your partner"s, "do-si-do"s, "promenade"s, and other such trivial movements. I was soon to find that I was quite wrong.
As usual, Leif knew just whom to call to find me a ride to where I was going, and the next Monday I walked to a Shell gas station near the Wohnung to meet a blue Honda whose driver would take me to the dance hall. (I've had more "blind dates" of this nature this summer than ever before, and I can't imagine being bold enough to go through with any of them without the enthusiasm, trust, and sense of adventure which my wonderful experience and friends from two years at Princeton have taught me. I'm so glad that I have, though, or I would have missed out on so many experiences.) Her name was Rita, and she was friendly and talkative as we drove the ten minutes to Buntenbock, the next village over. She asked me if I had any prior experience in line or square dancing, and, recalling middle school gym classes of dancing the Cotton Eye Joe and Electric Slide, and the aforementioned square dance experiences, I ventured an uncertain yes. We arrived after the square dance lesson, unfortunately, or I perhaps could have saved some of my dignity and received a bit of a warning of what was to come. As it was, I quickly learned that the line dances this group practiced were significantly more involved than the simple ones I had learned. Nonetheless I stood in a corner and watched carefully, and when a dance seemed simple enough that I could reasonably get the hang of it, I would step to a spot in the formation least in the way and, eyes fixed firmly on the feet of the person in the group who seemed most comfortable with the pattern, attempt to mimic. I got a couple of them down passably, though I can't say that I would remember how to dance them on my own. It was enough, however, to impress the other members of the group, who repeatedly approached me and asked how I already seemed to know several of these dances, to which I replied with a blush that I had never seen them before but was just mimicking what I observed. As happened many times during my first few days in Clausthal, my background and reason for coming to such a small and "off the beaten path" town were inquired after, and my language proficiency (after it being revealed that I had studied German for less than a year) remarked upon and admired. At first the people were reluctant to speak to me in German, and a few who knew English addressed me in it, but I always responded in German to the best of my ability and they soon accepted that I could understand just about everything they were saying, even if I didn't always know how to respond. All of this served to inflate my pride somewhat, but all of my haughty self-confidence was about to come crashing down as the hour of line dance came to an end and it came time for square dancing.
Now, I've always been too shy to ask a guy to dance, my boyfriend being the only exception, and that only recently. So my strategy is to stand near the edge of the dance floor and look hopefully and expectantly out onto the festivities, hoping someone will take pity upon me and ask. It was the same here, but since I was new one of the older members of the group graciously extended his hand to me at the first dance. I was fairly quivering with excitement as we stood in formation and I heard the familiar, "Bow to your partner; your corner too"... and then things fell apart. The caller was ostensibly speaking English, but half the time I couldn't make out what he was saying - and even when I could, it was unfamiliar commands like "Tag the Line" or "Weave the Ring" or "Two Ladies Chain." Sometimes the move was self-explanatory, such as "All Face In" (and even that's a little ambiguous - how do you define "in"?) but more often than not it was something completely not intuitive (how does one describe a "California Twirl"?) I quickly became completely lost but tried to put a brave face on it and keep alert, trying to disturb the flow of the dance as little as possible by looking desperately to my fellow dancers for clues. When a move was called and I was forcibly moved into the correct position (which happened more often than not) I would try to remember what that meant, but so many of the calls were so similar! How was I supposed to remember the difference between a "Swing Through", "Pull Through", "Pass Through", "Slide Through" and "Turn Through"? I wasn't completely horrible - I recognized a couple of moves (Allemande Left, Do-Si-Do, Swing and Promenade) but the vast majority of the time I would respond to a command with a blank look and a nervous giggle. Sparing you any more agonizing details, suffice it to say it turned out to be a very embarrassing and disorganized dance because of my incompetence. When the entire thing was finally over, I retreated shamefacedly into the corner. One of the callers soon followed me over and said, very slowly and clearly (in German), "Do you understand me?" When I assured him, blushing, that I did (he must have chalked my blundering up to an inability to understand the commands - I wish I could have blamed it on that!), he asked me curiously if I had ever square-danced before. Thinking about my experiences in comparison to what I had just bungled through, I realized that the proper response was "no", and told him so.
As soon as the members of the group found out that I had, in fact, virtually no square-dance experience, everything changed. Their attitude went from, "Wow, this girl's really not very good" to "Oh, poor dear, she's never been taught and is flying by the seat of her pants". Needless to say I was not invited to dance any more that first week, for which I was actually quite grateful. At the end of the time, the caller came up to me to explain a little more about square dance as they danced it here. It turns out that there are international rules for square dance, which is why all of the figures are called in English. There is an official rule book which describes all 62 of the basic figures in detail, and then there are additional figures which correspond to higher levels of complexity. This particular group dances "Mainstream", which is the first level of square dance beyond Basic. This means that there are 82 separate calls that one has to know how to perform from any possible configuration, in time to the music. Once this was all explained to me, I promised to look up the figures on the internet and learn them so that I could join in the dance without embarrassing and frustrating the other members of the group.
Somehow, though I only had to be in the lab 8 hours a day and had relatively few social commitments outside of the institute, I never managed to get as much done in my "free time" as I planned. Many grand projects passed the summer undone, and studying square dance was no exception. I remembered a couple of times, usually on Monday evenings while I was hastening to finish my supper before Rita or Jorgin picked me up for the lesson. But I found an excellent site where all 82 figures were described in detail with accompanying animated graphics of the dancers moving, so I could better visualize where each dancer should start and end up. I picked it up remarkably quickly (surprising even myself) and by the third week could dance an entire dance without getting confused and lost more than five times or so (and to give you some sense of scale, each dance lasts about 15 minutes and can include up to 100 calls, though there is often a pattern or string of calls that is repeated several times throughout the dance). All of the group members marveled at my learning curve - Jorgin, my sulky chauffeur while Rita was on vacation, complained that in three weeks I had learned more of square dancing than he had in 15 months, which I bashfully attributed to my youth.
One thing is true, I never failed to enjoy myself - the group was friendly and laughed a lot, and everyone always greeted me with a smile. It was definitely always one of the highlights of my week, and one of the aspects of Clausthal which I will miss the most when I return. Apparently, the group will miss me, too. On my last week here, I missed my ride because I got caught up doing something else and came late to our meeting spot, and Rita did not have her cell phone on her so she just assumed I wasn't coming. Undeterred (and determined not to miss my last chance to square dance), I took the bike Leif had lent me for the summer and rode along the back way to the dance hall (I was sure glad I had scoped it out before now!), arriving just a few minutes late. The season is approaching where the group will have many performances at folk events and such, so they were running through all of the line dances they knew, and I could only step in on a couple of them. Then in the middle of the practice the caller stopped everyone and, smiling at me, asked me to come to the middle of the room. He made a very nice speech about how enjoyable it was to have me there and to see how quickly I learned, and I just stood there with a gigantic smile on my face and blushing as hard as I could. Then another senior member of the group stepped forward with a present for me - a beautiful picture of the group, all decked out in their performance garb (cowboy hats and all) in a frame made of pine branches - appropriate for the Harzer Country Dancers. In addition to this wonderful photo, they attached a token to the frame. Now, once a dancer has "graduated", meaning that they are certified to know all 82 figures, they receive a very nice name plate from their home group. Then, when they travel around and dance at other groups, they receive a token from that group as a gift, which they attach to their name plate to show how well-traveled they are. I haven't graduated yet, and I have no home group, but if and when I do I will be able to attach the Harzer Country Dancer token to it, and if I travel around and get involved in this worldwide phenomenon I will always carry the memory of this wonderful group of friendly people with me in a very real way.
Now, I fully intend this blog to be something more than a chronological record of my daily activity in the summer. I want you to learn something from my adventures, as well. If I had been too shy to step out into such a totally new social situation as the square dance group (or the church I will tell you about in my next post), I never would have known the fun I have had and the friends I have made this summer. While it certainly pays to be wise and discerning, sometimes the best adventures are to be had well outside of our normal comfort zones and social circles. I have learned the valuable skill of laughing at myself and not valuing my pride higher than a good experience or lesson learned, and it has opened the door to many a friendship and memory that I look back upon fondly. So, especially if you're still young, don't be afraid to try new things. You will often be surprised at the warmth and generosity of others, and even if you should chance to have a bad experience, learn to take it in stride and don't let it stop you from trying again next time. Who knows how many hidden talents and passions you may uncover, and how many new friends you may find who may come into your life again in unexpected ways in the future!
Okay, enough moralizing. Go out and enjoy life to the fullest, and above all, keep smiling!!
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