Who am I?
I would describe myself as a huge dance aficionado 🙂 because I cannot imagine not having dance, any dance, in my life! Next to cooking, I can talk endlessly about dancing, so I decided to dedicate this blog to everything dance, for me and anyone else who is interested in dances of the world.
Dance is an art, expression of emotions, (demanding) physical exercise, but most of all … it makes me feel alive! It helps me pick up myself when I’m down and once I have moved to some music, suddenly life looks so much better!
My name is Aranea and I am not a professional dancer, but I dance for fun. Shy as I am, I have done a lot of dancing over the years (at parties and on stage) and I know in my heart that I will keep dancing until I can’t lift my feet any more 🙂
Do I have a favorite style? Not really, but I guess that depends on the stage of life I’m in. Growing up, my mom used to play Paul Anka, Skeeter Davis, the Blue Danube (waltz), Mozart, Carmen (opera), all music we danced to at home. At parties, there were other styles and we never sat still because the music just called us to move.
I have taken formal classes in classical ballet, loving every minute of it, painful as it sometimes was. When my back no longer allowed the strenous demands of classical (which thoroughly depressed me, I switched two years later to jazz ballet and dance aerobics. In college I took modern ballet and even performed a couple of times with the dance ensemble in the annual student show. As an adult I also started taking club salsa classes to ‘refine’ my latin dancing.
And my latest interest? The Spanish flamenco, the most difficult dance I’ve ever tried to learn and it will probably take the rest of my life to get the technique and its ‘duende’ (spirit), hopefully before my body falls apart!
