Monday, October 16, 2006

Line Dancing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"A line dance is a formation dance in which a group of people dance in a line formation or in lines, and they all execute the same dance moves individually. "

Line dancing has had a cowboy image, and it was danced predominantly to country-western music. This has been changing since the late 1990s, as more young people became involved. Today, country music may make up the minority of a DJ's play list, with the balance spread through a variety of many different musical styles both new and old. Genres including Celtic, Swing, Pop, Rock, Big Band, Folk, and almost anything else that has a regular beat.

History
Line dance is sometimes thought of as originating in the Wild West. In fact, it has a much more diverse background. Many folk dances are danced in unison in lines, usually single lines, and often with a connection between dancers. Such unison movements done by separate individuals in line might be traced back to old styles of group exercise. There have been line dances during the heyday of many modern popular music styles, including swing, rock and roll, and disco.

Line dancing's current popularity grew out of the disco period, when the country-western dance and music communities continued to explore and develop this form of dancing.

Billy Ray Cyrus' 1992 hit Achy Breaky Heart, helped catapult western line dancing back into the musical mainstream's public consciousness, and in 1998, the band Steps created further interest with the techno dance song "5,6,7,8".

Line dancing is a popular recreation activity and is practiced and learned in country-western dance bars, social clubs, dance clubs and ballrooms worldwide. It avoids the problem of imbalance of male/female partners that plagues ballroom/swing/salsa dancing clubs. It is sometimes combined on dance programs with other forms of country-western dance, such as two-step, shuffle, and western promenade dances, as well as western-style variants of the waltz, polka and swing.

Line dancing in the late 1990s, and so far through the 2000s, has changed in some line dance clubs with the main bulk of the dancing done to pop music. This has brought with it a renewed interest in the dance form for people of all ages.

Line dancing is now seen not just as a form of dance but also as good exercise and as a good social scene.

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Guess what? I'm a line dancer. It started in 2002, in my College. There were various instructors along the way. The first one was an elderly man. (Yup, a man and he's a good dancer). He taught us for a few months. He was actually preparing a group to perform a Chinese dance for our big boss's 60th wedding anniversary which I didn't take part. After the performance, there was a break before a group of us invited another instructor - a lady. She is quite old as well. After a few lessons, she introduced a younger lady to teach us. Eventually, we had a regular group of 6 in the class. I was the only lecturer. The rest were all administrators and 1 outsider. We had the lesson once a week for one and a half hours each session.

The lessons were really fun. I enjoyed it so much that I took up extra lessons near my housing area and also from my facial lady. I even thought of starting my own line dancing class! I was really passionate about it. Well, I did conduct 2 lessons in my church family retreat. It was interesting and enjoyable.

I made my debut on 29 February 2004 at Hotel SinggahSana, Petaling Jaya. We performed a rock-and-roll line dance. Cool, eh ? I invited Seng Chor and my sister to the event. I was nervous but glad that it went well. We had fun dancing the whole afternoon. We also took turns to lead the floor in some line dancing. I will try to upload some photos later.

We stopped the line dancing after I found out that I was pregnant. Moreover, only 3 were keen to continue. Two stopped because of personal reasons, another migrated to Australia. So, the group was disbanded. Recenty, my passion was renewed. Two of us decided to continue on our own just for fun. From my previous posts, you have probably read that we had a performance at a College event. Initially, I hesitated to take part, but glad that I did it! I got to know some of my colleagues better as well. More importantly, I need to lose some weight!!!

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