June - All that Jazz

Following the pain of Bollywood Grooves I have decided to dumb-down my approach to Crash-dancing this month & opt for an “Absolute Beginners” class in Jazz.

I have no idea what Jazz dancing involves. Presumably hands. But I take comfort in knowing I fit the “Absolute Beginner” category perfectly & what’s more, I have hands.

Someone once told me “forewarned is forearmed”. With hindsight they took their maxim too literally & shot things with arrows. Yet this mantra has remained with me since, so pre-class I have a little online snoop to check out the lo-down of my soon to be Jazz tutor.

She is the unfeasibly tanned, ginger-haired love child of Bonnie Langford & David Dickinson. And just as I’m reaching to adjust the colour tones on my monitor I read the worst combination of words that any “absolute beginner” could possibly read: “recently seen as boot camp expert with simon cowell on the x factor…”

Oh joy.

The packed class is the size & temperature of a Kew Gardens’ hot house. There’s no time for introductions. There’s no time for gentle stretching. There’s not even time to imagine that there’s a wire attaching my head to the ceiling…

Instead, we begin with the renowned boot camp aerobics warm up. The girl next to me promptly sinks down into the box splits.

Absolute Beginners my arse.

And here lies the problem with these classes, whereby the level for the mass is set by the ability of the strongest dancers present who have a life time of dance experience under their size zero belts. It leaves any true beginners like myself out-daunted & out-danced. Sure we all have to learn. I would just prefer to learn with other true beginners; or possibly toddlers at this rate.

Following the physical humiliation of a shattering aerobics warm up we are then made to dance like Pussycat Dolls to a tortuous track ironically called “Hush Hush”. Wishing the track would stop, I shuffle in the back completely in awe of how vain folk can be. They eye-up their feline selves in the wall length mirrors and appear to come onto their very own reflections.

Meanwhile, I do a very good (if not somewhat puritanical) jazz routine. Unfortunately it doesn’t represent anyone else’s routine. I get a little frustrated that the others aren’t keeping pace & storm off in a diva hissy fit, leaving the Jazz hot house without their Nicole Scherzinger.