American in Spain » Dancing

Sevillana

erik — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 09:40:30 +0000

The word Sevillana, pronounced “seh-vee-YA-na”, can refer to several things. It can be an adjective to describe a woman or any feminine noun from Seville, Spain. It can refer to a particular kind of folk music from Andalusia, or a particular four-part dance that originated in Seville. Like for other Spanish dances like the pasodoble, it doesn’t require much imagination to see that the movements in a sevillana dance are meant to mimic bullfighting, with the dancers gracefully passing buy each other without touching. The whole closeness without touching aspect of it makes it quite sexy.

The fourth meaning attributed to the word Sevillana in my mind is to refer to the style of flamenco dresses worn in Seville during the Feria de Abril (April Fair). They are very colorful and frilly. Cheap knockoffs are sold in local town markets across Spain as costumes for children. Last month, for fun, Nora’s abuela bought her one, complete with plastic castanets, bracelets, hair combs and clip-on earrings. She also got some high heeled flamenco dancing shoes to go with it. Nora loves to wear the outfit and asks to most days.

I guess you could call these her “Sevillian clothes”, eh?

If I lived in Seville, I’d make that joke at least once a day.

What follows is a video of my wife dancing Sevillanas in a dark dance club in Madrid five years ago. She doesn’t really know how, but she’s an excellent faker, and her partner is a talented Sevillana dancer. We’d both like to take some classes sometime.

Related Photos

Dancing With Mommy

erik — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 08:49:48 +0000

Sometimes when Marga gets back from picking Nora up at daycare, they stop by to see me before going on a walk. I often have music playing in my office when I’m working, and sometimes Nora starts to dance. Only after watching her for a while last week did I think to get the camera to record a little of it. Pretty cute, if you ask me.

In the middle, what Marga says is that Nora is moving her arm for her to keep up the rhythm.

Related Photos

Baby DJ

erik — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:53:22 +0000

Almost a fortnight ago, Marga’s cousin, Rubén, and his girlfriend, Patri, gave Nora a toy, in the shape of a butterfly, that plays up to 30 different songs. In other modes it will pronounce the letters, and some words that start with them, from the alphabet. But Nora’s not quite at that stage yet, so we keep it in the “music” mode. She absolutely adores this toy. Without fail, as soon as it starts playing music, she starts dancing, which has been a tendency of hers for some time now. The music selection is also perfectly appropriate for Nora, with a mixture of American songs like Oh my darling, Clemintine and Tennessee Waltz and some Spanish pasodobles. The video below is pretty typical of her playing with this lovely toy.

Nora spins some wicked vinyl. Eat your heart out, Fat Boy Slim!

Related Photos

Every Move You Make

erik — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:01:17 +0000

Nora continues with her tendency to dance whenever she hears music. Last week when I put her in her crib while I looked through her wardrobe for some clothes for the day, I had her iPad playing some music. She was groovin’, so I ran to get the video camera. Check out her pantomime of a “midnight train going anywhere”.

YouTube has blocked this video in Germany (sorry, Germans!) because they’re the only ones that figured out that it might contain copyrighted music.

Related Photos

Dancing Baby

erik — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 08:43:59 +0000

Within the past week or so, we have noticed a new behavior in Nora. Whenever she hears music, from classical to bagpipes to hip-hop to rock, she raises her arms in the air and moves her body around. She’s dancing! At first I was skeptical, because A) no one taught her this, and B) she moves around weird like that sometimes when there’s no music. But after running a week of tests with various stimuli, I’m convinced that she really is responding to the rhythm of the music. It also helps that when she’s doing her best to remain standing up, because her balancing muscles are not yet up to the task, her hips and torso sway around like she’s a drunken Elvis. I know that dancing can be found in every human culture, but I wasn’t expecting it to be quite this…innate.

Turn up your speakers before pressing play. And feel free to dance along with her.

On the other hand, I was spinning her mother around the dance floor up to five days before Nora was born, so perhaps she got some in utero rhythm.

Related Photos

Bill Shannon – Dancing on Crutches

erik — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:59:21 +0000

A tweet by Ze Frank got me watching some videos of Bill Shannon. On crutches from a disability for most of his childhood, he has invented a new style of dance. Ze, as usual, summarized it perfectly with only one word: Inspiring.

Performance

Technique

Related Photos

Dancing A Jig

erik — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:12:15 +0000

The following is a video I took on Sunday of little Nora in her Sunday dress performing her favorite activity: kicking. She’s been an avid kicker for 6 months now, only 2.5 of which has she been out here in the extramommy world. She’s one calorie-burning aerobic baby. Judging from how much she likes bath time, I’m thinking she might be a good swimmer.

Who says you have to be able to stand up to dance a jig?

Related Photos

Thursday Salsa Dancing

erik — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:04:35 +0000

For the past couple years, Marga and I have been going out salsa dancing most Thursday nights, and we have become good friends with the group that we go out with. The ritual involves meeting at a bar, having a beer, going to another bar, having another beer, going to a sandwich bar, having a sandwich, and then finally going to another bar that puts on salsa, meringue, bachata, and cha-cha-cha music just for us. The routine is so regular that the bartenders at each place know us and give us regular customer perks. It’s very nice. Last Thursday, my parents got to go along for the ride.

Having sandwiches.

The whole gang. Click through to Flickr to see names.

An empty bottle with a fake label. Fox could sell the license to that name for a lot of money.

Dancing bachata with Marga. It’s an intimate dance.

Salsa with Elena.

Juan Carlos was very patient dancing with my mother, who can count her hours of salsa lessons on one hand.

After about an hour or so, it was time to head home. The next day we had a mountain hike planned!

Related Photos

Weekend in Suances

erik — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:40:30 +0000

We spent this past weekend in an intensive salsa dancing seminar in the picturesque Cantabrian town of Suances. The invited instructors were mostly from a Milan-based dance troupe called Tropical Gem. My videos of the dance steps we learned are not unlike the ones I took last year, so I won’t post them. The weather was spectacular, so on Saturday we took a little stroll on the beach.

Some cool semaphore benches we could see from our hotel room balcony.

A view of the ocean from our balcony.

Kite fliers.

Waves rolling in.

A big rocky hill, a man, and a decrepit building.

Looking up at the condos on the hill from where this shot was taken.

Crash!

Foamy

It was kind of entertaining watching these waves catch up and pass each other.

These guys could slide quite a ways on the beach.

Rusty post. Does anyone know the official name for these things? I know the little ones are called “cleats”, but what about these large ones?

Orange kite.

Yellow kite.

This guy’s gonna be finding sand in his body crevices all week!

Mayday! Mayday! We’re going down!

This was the leader of the Italian troupe, Tropical Gem. He might be one of the most beautiful people I’ve seen in person. His charisma completely fills the stage. When he’s around it’s hard to look at anyone else. His body and the way he moves it are absolutely amazing. Even his matching tit tats are kinda cool. He wears nothing but expensive designer clothes and generally looks like a celebrity. Here’s the video of him demonstrating what he taught us last year. To see him really move, check out this video from the finals of a world salsa competition in Puerto Rico.

When we got back home, we did some painting around our new windows that we had installed last week. I’ll get a post in about that sometime soon when we have the finished “after” photos to show.

Related Photos

First Wedding Photos

erik — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:11:57 +0000

This is a “viewer generated content” post. I didn’t take one single photo during my wedding.

The first is my father’s write-up of his trip. He has a tendency to write documents about his vacations. He gets it from his father-in-law. So I guess you can say that blogging runs in my family. The document is 11.5 MB, 31 pages, and full of wonderful pictures. It’s nice to get an American opinion on the events, since my viewpoint is no longer completely naive to Spanish traditions. It’s definitely worth a read.

Click on the image to download the document.

This photo came from Jacob’s camera, but he obviously didn’t take it. Click to see identifying notes.

The following photos are by Liz Winfrey. Some of them are so good, I might try to see if I can get them to the wedding photographers to be included in the official album.

Well-groomed groom.

The groom’s parents and grandmother. You can tell where my good looks come from.

Marga’s father escorts her from the car, a spiffy Audi 8, to the church.

Great wrought-iron shadow shot of the church entrance.

Aunt Marga helping place the rings and coins into the baskets for the kids to carry down the aisle.

Marga looking threateningly at the little demon-child that carried the rings while shouting, “This is no wedding! This is not a wedding!” He had to be removed from the church during the service. Whether or not he was executed with Godfather music playing as the priest was speaking, is, as of yet, unconfirmed.

My mother walked me down the aisle.

Continuing down the aisle, trying not to trip and fall.

At the altar, barely visible around Hubber’s big fat bald ‘ploob-smuggling head.

The golden church was quite beautiful.

Awesome fish-eye action looking towards the rear of the church.

Another nice fish-eye shot.

Marga’s sister and cousin performed a Basque “Welcome” dance for us. Neither of the four of us could look at each other directly without crying.

Streamers and rice.

Hey, who invited Uncle Ben!?

Could any photo say “wedding” better than this one? Gorgeous!

Every wedding has one of these children, I think.

Cake chopping. It was harder than it looks.

Husband and wife.

Let the cigar smoking commence!

Puff puff.

Some people make smoking look good. Rachel looks like she stepped out of a Bond movie.

All of Liz’s photos are available for your perusal here: thumbnails or slideshow

And the following photos are from Hubbers:

Uh oh, the groom’s been drinking.

Oh, wait, it’s okay if the bride is pouring.

And we danced all night….