This was my very first performance with Ricardo, which wasn’t supposed to have happened.
It was March of 2010.
Ricardo López was coming to Portland to give workshops...
How to dance flamenco, flamenco travel in Spain, flamenco dance students and their experiences, interviews with flamenco artists, translations of flamenco letras (songs) from Spanish to English
Viewing entries tagged
feelings
This was my very first performance with Ricardo, which wasn’t supposed to have happened.
It was March of 2010.
Ricardo López was coming to Portland to give workshops...
Every time I return home from the Flamenco Tour to Jerez I feel stronger. (It’s impossible not to after all of that time in class with Mercedes Ruíz.) I've learned how to turn the physical strength gained through dancing flamenco into mental strength to help me face challenges in my life. At the end of this post, I'll lead you through an activity to help you do the same.
Let’s begin with an excerpt from my journal a few years ago upon returning home from The Flamenco Tour:
I am home, and I feel it,
The strength.
I feel it in my body, and I feel it in my being. (I always forget how this happens.)
The thing I wasn’t strong enough to do before I left. I can now do it. The thing I tried so many times to do before but couldn’t. The thing I kept trying to do but told myself I wasn’t strong enough to do.
Tengo un secreto.
I’m
afraid
to go
to Spain.
But not for the usual reasons.
Nope.
I’m afraid to take people there. Even though this will be the fourth time I’ve taken a group there to study.
"I want to be in class with Mercedes ALL of the time." That is what I wrote in my journal on April 13. But let's go back in time.
I came back to Jerez on Friday, March 25 and began investigating classes to take.
But I secretly didn't want to go to any.
A week in Jerez by myself. Poor planning by Laura. When will I learn that it simply is not fun for me to do these things alone? A week spent looking for studios, making calls, trying to understand when and where the different classes took place, feeling relief as I kept arriving at the wrong times and missing them. There is a semi-funny reason for this, but you'll have to wait to hear about it in a future post...I would like to say that this was on account of Spanish unpredictability, but it wasn't.