... street hip hop ...

In spite of my ardent desire to rot at home and relish the absence of sunlight in my life...



Today, the Sunday of a long Easter weekend, the place where HL usually goes for her weekly dose of tap dancing had an open day. Free classes were held throughout the day at the *apparently* famous Pineapple Studios in London. Usually, I would have jumped through fiery hoops for free dance lessons. But with my current mood *it's been mopey for a while already*, I wasn't interested.
*never thought that was possible before*

Ended up somehow forcing myself to go - it was a good opportunity and within walking distance from my place anyway, whatever I felt. HL and M were interested in the only Fusion Funk class available which was at 1pm, but places were taken up before we even reach the place. so we queued up for the tickets to Street Hip Hop at 2pm instead, it being the best choice at that time slot and choices for 3pm were worse. I didn't mind since I wasn't in much of a mood, Hip-hop/jazz-fusion/street-rap/robotic/... was never down my alley.

The 2pm class was pretty full even though we were in Studio 1, the biggest in the place. Probably because many were like us, who didn't make it to Fusion Funk and settled for Street Hip Hop instead. Oh well, one can't expect too much on open days anyway and I focused my attention on how not to embarass myself while avoiding touching anyone else in the crowded room. Needless to say, it was embarassing.

The teacher holds regular classes where she teaches a bit of the routine each week, which makes up the whole exercise by combing the steps from several weeks. We were taught three eights *er, you know what I mean?* of the steps out of her own choreography after starting us off with some stretching *this was what I knew would give me muscle pain and cramps later, rather than the actual steps themselves*. The routine was so-so and seemed to lack some rhythm or musical sense to me. But then again, this is an open day class (can't bring in any really good moves) and perhaps street hip hop was meant to be like that (so as to be able to fit with whatever song chose). And so, for an hour, we went through the steps again and again, faster with each different song accompaniment, split into 2 groups to take turns practising, ... and all the time I was doing my best to avoid stepping onto anyone or being crashed into, while trying my best to appear inconspicous *hardly possible, me being one of about 2 Chinese in the crowded studio, and the much larger one at that -_-*. Even forgot to steal glances at HL and M, just to see how they dance.

HL has been taking lessons for a long time and M does classical Indian dance, both of them I have not seen dancing at all throughout our school life (plus CBN was one of those all-girls school where half of every school performance would inevitably involve some form of dancing or other). Wasted my change, it seems.

All in all, it wasn't taxing at all *the learning part, I mean - not the supposedly warm-up stretching exercises at the beginning or the ongoing mission-to-avoid-acute-embarrassment part* and I sweated only a bit. There were a couple of cramps here and there during warm-up stretches *which was to be expected since I haven't done any exercise in ages, much less trying to stretch properly in a crowded open day free class* and I was glad that the next day was a bank holiday *which I know I would spend most of it not moving around much so as to not agitate the ache in whatever little bit of muscle I still have*.

So... that was my brief encounter with street hip hop. And we went for a late lunch of tapas at La Tasca after that.