dance, little girl, dance!

So I'm thinking that maybe my dancing skills and ability to groove have improved.

This is all thanks to my gospel choir, who during rehearsals, with a just a few introductory chords on the piano, will get off their chairs and start moving and dancing like nobody's business. See, black folks exude coolness in their movements, even with the wackiest antics. Chinese people...not so much. Not me, anyway.

In an earlier post I mentioned auditioning for this choir back in September. Now, the audition was composed of elements one would associate with trying out for an amateur choir: I sang two pieces that I had prepared, and then they tested my vocal range, my ability to stay on pitch by singing a number of intervals, and my ear for picking out harmonies. Now that part was just crazy. They played a section of track of a choir singing and asked me to pick out the alto line and sing it back to them. I got to listen to it twice. Twice!! I managed to pull something off that I sort of half-made-up. And I figured the audition was over.

Medad, the choir director, sat back in his chair and said, "Ok Angela, now I'm going to play a song and I'm going to ask you to dance."

I froze for a few seconds until my brain had fully processed the weight of those words. "Um, you want me to dance." It wasn't even a question, because I knew I had heard it right. I think by saying that I was simply attempting to muster the willpower to do it.

It's not that I don't dance at all. I do. But when you're standing in front of two auditioners who are sitting behind a desk writing notes, and you're dressed in office wear because you just came off work and furthermore, facing a floor-to-ceiling window so that your awkward and possibly spastic-looking "dancing" is on display for all the passing-by world to gawk at, it gets a little weird, see?

"Just relax and have fun," said Medad as he hit the "play" button on the CD player. And they didn't ask me to dance for one song. They asked me to dance for two.

And now you all know that by some miracle of God and a lot of graciousness on their part, I made it in. And I'd like to think I've improved in the groove department. Medad no longer stops the entire practice mid-song to show me how to dance with a little more soul. On more than one occasion in the past he had to tell me "Angela, you have to just feel the beat, ya know what I'm sayin'?", "Shift your weight from one foot to another" and "Try not to jerk your head so much."

So for the gigs we've done in the last few months, I've gone in equipped with the confidence in knowing that I, too, can maybe dance with a little bit of soul. The delusion came to an abrupt end after one of our concerts and Juliana came up to me and said "Ange! That was great! You were so cute - being the little Chinese girl trying to dance with all the black people."

That's ok. I'll take "cute" over "Your dancing reminded me of William Hung" any day.