Improv

I'd like to say I'm fast on my mental feet, so to speak. Unfortunately I can't often say that: I'm the girl that comes up with the snappy comeback to a nasty comment about three hours after the fact. The girl who thinks up the perfect joke after already making an ass of herself at a party. Yeah. I'm not that girl. I'd be kicked out of the comedy olympics with a dirt medal: dead last. For some reason almost all my wit comes out in writing, not in speech.

As it turns out, I'm even clumsier at dance improv as I am at the vocal variety. Give me a choreographed piece and I'll learn it and be able to make changes from there. Turn on a piece of music I've never heard before and, while the rest of the class makes up moves and dances all around me, I'm the girl-in-the-headlights. I can't move, I can't think: seriously, I could get hit by a bus. And usually I'd prefer it to improvising dance to something I've never heard.

Yet that's how many of my BD classes seem to end lately. I know I'm supposed to get better at it with practice, but the fact is, after 5 years of bellydance classes, the last 2 in advanced classes, I'm still no better doing improv than a beginner whose never done the moves at all. I'm beginning to wonder if this is a dance disability I've given myself somehow, or if my brainpan just can't function in that situation.

For the record, I have a crappy time dancing at clubs and such if I don't know the music, also.

Sigh.