It's been said before (see previous entry, Shaking it at Salsa), Humboldt University has an impressive range of sports on offer for students but a major defect exists in their ruthless booking system. Within three minutes of bookings opening, I'd missed out on a coveted place in both Streetdance and Hip Hop. Other, savvier students were obviously sitting tensely around computers with their fingers poised far more strategically than mine when it came time to sign up. I refused to accept the prospect of a sloth-like summer merely moving from one currywurst outlet to the next beer garden, and in a fit of desperation, found myself parting with 13 Euros for an 8 week Hawaiian Hula Dance course.
Last Thursday, I trotted along to the first session, sheepishly disregarding instructions to wear a skirt, bring a towel, a drink bottle and a padlock for the lockers. I should have known I'd be the only one in jeans, which are so incredibly unsuitable for Hawaiian hula dancing I think the teacher's irritation actually turned to pity on the spot when she witnessed my awkward hip wiggle in tight blue denim.
The class was unlike any dance class I'd experienced, which is saying something considering I've spent a significant part of my youth in jazz and tap dancing classes and have recently started salsa lessons. The teacher, a round, bubbly woman in an enormous blue Hawaiian print skirt and transparent white blouse, announced at the beginning of the class that she would be correcting our posture with her hands, and to speak up if we had a problem with being touched. This was completely fine, and made for some bordering-on-hilarious moments of hip grabbing to correct wayward thrusting. What was a little harder to bear was the insistence on taking it s...l....o....w - we were permitted to laboriously master one move only per song (largely Elvis Presley and other tracks of that era featuring the ukelele). There were many, many tracks of hip swinging and gentle hand waves with the occasional "aloha" or "sun" or "island" movement to inject elements of a story into our dance, movements which I've decided fortunately do have some potential to be adapted for general club move-busting.
Surprisingly challenging was the hand cramping situation we had to contend with after about 20 minutes of gluing our thumbs to our forefingers. Visible thumbs are the height of ugliness in hula dance and must be hidden during hand waving at all costs. Unfortunately, years of computer use have left my hands permanently in a claw-like deformed state and serious pain ensued from attempts to move them fluidly. I had to let them drop to avoid a seizure.
After an hour and a half of Elvis, hip wiggling, cramped hands and a disappointing lack of sweat, I had to wonder whether the belly chuckles provided the class (largely by personal efforts to slow hips down to an acceptable pace) will be enough to keep me going for 7 more weeks. For me hula dance is a bit like reading two pages of a book in an hour, with ukeleles. Kind of relaxing but also unnaturally slow and a bit painful. I'm attempting to reserve judgment until further classes and until I've procured a bona fide skirt which I'm hoping will make all the difference.
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