Extreme Dancesport Summer Showcase

After the Eastern comp, I had decided that I would wait until June to do my next competition. This allowed me to work hard on my technique, move up a level to Silver, and work on routines for the Summer Showcase.

Back in July when I had started dancing at Extreme, I was able to go to the Winter Showcase. Unfortunately it was too soon to prepare any routines, but it was a chance for me to cheer on my friends and photograph dancers for the first time. Since then, I was looking forward to the next showcase that I could perform in...

Being crazy, I decided that I wanted to do three different routines for this Summer 08 Showcase...

First, we choreographed an American Rumba routine to One Republic's "Apologize" with my pro/am partner, Leonid Turetsky.















After spending some time working on my International Latin dances, I quickly found how much I loved the Jive... So naturally we had to do a jive rouine to the awesome Michael Buble's song, "Crazy Little Thing Called Love". This is probably one of my favorite routines.













My final performance was a three person salsa with Angeline Egea and our salsa teacher, Artem Buynevich. Really there isn't much explaining to be done, it was pretty great... check it out.

Swimmer turned dancer...

I had always loved dancing... But early on, I had established myself as a three sport athlete being a part of swim, soccer, and lacrosse teams from grade school through college. After recovering from a swimming injury and returning home after graduating college, I was in need of finding a sport to fulfill my competitive drive.

I was told about a ballroom dance studio in Cambridge, and quickly started taking as many classes as I could fit into my schedule. Soon after learning some basic dances, I decided to start preparing to compete Pro/Am and bwegan to add private lessons to my already crazy schedule.

In February 2008, The Eastern Dancesport Championship was my first competition in Boston, held at The Park Plaza Hotel. Although I took classes in all styles from club salsa to american rumba to samba... I only competed in the American Rhythm dances, dancing American ChaCha, Rumba, Swing and Mambo in the Bronze level...


After only dancing for under 6 months, I not only found myself absolutely loving the competition of ballroom dancing, but being drawn to the performance aspect as well. I danced my heart out and got first place in all my single dances and 1st in my American Rhythm Bronze Scholarship as well :) One hell of a first competition!

Salsa Performance

Figured some videos might be a fun place to start...

I have only been dancing for a little over a year, and had been training for Pro/Am Ballroom competitions.. Shortly after finishing my most recent competition in NYC - Manhattan Dancesport Championships - my friend and I had been social dancing a lot at a local salsa club in Cambridge -Ryles- and were given the chance to do a performance of our choice... Naturally, we got to work and started joint choreographing a salsa routine to one of our old favorites - Micaela by Sonora Carruseles. The first video is the performance at Ryles (unfortunately our video camera didnt do well with the low lighting and bright christmas lights...) But the audio makes it worth it heh



With all the practicing we had been doing, our friends at our studio, Extreme Dancesport, quickly found out about our new routine and club performance, and we were asked to perform the routine again at one of the studio's Friday Night Dance Parties. Along with the fact that we love performing in every way, we had worked with this particular studio for a long time and it was an honor to be asked to perform for them. It was also great to get a second chance to video tape the routine... this time making sure the lighting was a bit better suited for the camera.




We had a great time, and it was one hell of an experience choreographing completely on our own, and being able to perform outside of the Pro/Am Ballroom scene that we had been used to.

Enjoy! :D