Ice Dance Class #1 - Patch Blades!

Tonight was the first session of the summer ice dance class with Naomi at Chandler.  Unfortunately I didn't have my freestyle boots, but I'd already paid for the class so I decided (with JJ's encouragement) to go ahead and do it anyway.  It's an hour class.

We spent the first part of the class working through basic ice dance elements -- chassés, slide chassés, and cross chassés (a.k.a. the tuck-behinds in the Rhythm Blues).  All not too bad except for the cross chassés of course.  Yow.

From there we went on to review swing rolls and cross rolls.  Not too bad although getting on a flat in patch blades is kinda scary as once again we have the skidding problem :-(.

Next we spent the rest of the session working through the Canasta Tango, adding it together step by step until by the end we had run through the whole thing (including restart) a couple of times.  Yay!  Unfortunately we did not get to run it with music :-(.

I was really pleased that I was able to keep up reasonably well in my patch blades.  It was a bit scary at times -- I'm not used to going (relatively) fast in them, much less doing crossovers and swingrolls.  Yow.  But really it went remarkably well and I was pleased with myself.

There are only 7 people signed up for the class (6 of us tonight), and one other adult (my buddy Lora) so I'm not the only one.  It's smaller than last year's class, which is nice for us though maybe not so nice for the rink.