Swing or Nothing!

On March 14-15, 2009, I participated in the 24-Hour Cancer Dance-A-Thon in Irving, CA, dancing on a team of San Francisco Lindy Hoppers — The Hot Bloods. The Dance-a-thon is a 24 hour swing dance fundraiser, with a mission to raise money for cancer research and treatment at City of Hope Hospital. The event is like a walk-a-thon except that instead of walking, participants raise money by swing dancing! All participants, DJs, bands and instructors at the event are volunteers.

This cause is especially dear to me because my mom, Eulalia Rego, passed away from ovarian cancer on January 2, 2009. All of my fundraising efforts are dedicated to her memory.

Post-Dance-A-Thon Wrap-Up (3/20/09)

Believe it or not, it was a lot of fun to be cooped up in gym with 200-300 other dancers, moving and grooving to great swing bands, DJs, taking dance lessons and more…all in the name of raising money for cancer research and treatment.

Here are some of the exciting final statistics:

1. The Dance-A-Thon raised a grand total of $130,453.11! 100% of that goes to the City of Hope Hospital!
2. My Hot Bloods teammates and I were the 5th highest fund-raising team, bringing in a total of $7791. Not bad for our first appearance at the dance-a-thon!
3. I was the 8th highest fundraiser, raising $1670!
4. 45 people sponsored me with an average donation of $37.11!
5. 32 of my sponsors were from the swing dance community, and 13 were friends and family.
6. 6 of my sponsors were “gold” sponsors, in that they donated $100 or more.

Every little bit adds up, so thank you to ALL my sponsors for your generous contributions. The Hot Bloods team, still recovering from sleep deprivation and all the dancing, has already started exchanging emails about planning for next year’s dance-a-thon. We hope you will be a part of it when the time comes, but in the meantime, here are some photos from the event.

Some of my favorite moments from the dance-a-thon were:

• dancing with my Hot Bloods teammates
• leading a swingout line where all we did was swingout for the entire song
• dancing in the jack and jill contest and seeing the sign that my teammates made to cheer me on
• the delirious drive back after the event, waking up to find that Charlie had taken a 2 hour detour onto Highway 99 instead of Highway 5! Yikes!

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I’ve been reading and exploring a lot of Buddhist material in my personal life these days, so I’ve taken that as inspiration to write a little about some Zen-like bits of experience that I’ve picked up while learning to dance over the years. Each of the three experiences I’ll relate was with a different dance teacher, and I hope they don’t mind my mentioning their names here. This will be a 3-part series, with one teacher per post. Here’s part three.

3) Breath Awareness with Kathe Burick

Kathe Burick was my tap dance teacher for a 16-week beginning tap class that I took at San Francisco City College back in 2007. Kathe teaches tap there regularly, and the class is one of the best deals in town, not only because it only costs $20 for all 16 weeks, 2 hours a week, but you also get to take class with a woman who is not only a great tapper, but also an inspiring teacher who teaches from her heart.

At the time I took Kathe’s class, I was going through a difficult time in my emotional and personal life, enough so that I found it challenging to stay mentally focused through the 2-hour class. At times my mind would wander absently to the fixation of that particular era of my life, and though my body was physically in the tap bungalow, my presence was somewhere in a galaxy far, far away.

Outside of class, I had started reading about meditation practice, and had begun trying it out myself, and some of the first things I read were about breath awareness, focusing one’s attention on one’s own breath as a means of calming oneself and bringing oneself back to the present moment. I experimented with this in class.

When I was in Kathe’s tap class, if I caught my mind wandering, I simply acknowledged that fact to myself, and then took a deep, gentle breath, re-centering myself and bringing my attention back to the class.

Taking that deep breath was like hitting a mental reset button. I visualized myself as a kind of conduit through which the knowledge Kathe was conveying could flow through as she taught. My mental wanderings and fixations were like blockages in a pipe, bits of accumulated dirt and debris which reduced the efficiency of the flow of knowledge. Breathing in and out was like flushing the pipe clean, so that the knowledge and experience could flow freely once again.

Now, what makes this more a story about Kathe, is that I noticed several times in class when it seemed that Kathe had become aware of someone’s mental distraction (including my own), and rather than giving a stern rebuke, she actually quieted down and took a deep breath in and out herself, deep enough that one could hear it, and everyone in class seemed respond by also taking a parallel breath in and out. It was as if Kathe’s breath had been a gentle invitation to return to the present moment, to the class…that she as teacher was keyed into our attention level and helping us hit our own mental reset button when she saw that we needed it.

Towards the end of the 16-week class, I asked Kathe whether her act of breathing in and out was a conscious effort to help her students relax and bring them back to attention. As a teacher myself, I was particularly interested in the answer. I think Kathe said that it happened intuitively, and that chances were that I already did it myself in my own classes without realizing it.

Still, these days, having personally experienced some of the benefits of breath awareness, I try to be aware, among many other things going on during class, of my students breathing and attention patterns; if I sense a bit of tension, distraction or frustration, I try to take a deep breath myself, inviting my students along with me, and hitting that reset button.

Thanks for that cool trick, Kathe!

(…and that concludes this three part series.)

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I’ve got a big dance performance gig coming up on April 18, 2009 and the group putting on the show, the Bay School in San Francisco, requested promotional photos to send out to their attendees. It’s been a while since I had some updated and high-quality shots done, so I contacted Dave Wong over at SweetSmile.com. Dave used to Lindy Hop and DJ at Lindy in the Park back when I started dancing, although nowadays I believe his passion has shifted to photography. Dave does awesome work, and the results speak for themselves…presenting the Swing or Nothing Dancers!

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