blooming city cafe: Flamenco Demonstration

Yesterday (Thursday March 29th) I danced flamenco for a demonstration at International Spouses' Circle at IU International Center - it was the first occasion I danced flamenco in Bloomington, and after as long as one year of absence of flamenco in my life since I left Japan last May. I started taking flamenco lessons about 10 years ago, and although there were couple of times I couldn't take classes for several months for various reasons, this is the longest absence of flamenco in my life in these past 10 years. (I'm not doing any flamenco now here in Bloomington because I haven't found any good teacher around here.)
After this demonstration, it made me realize how much I have missed flamenco... but well, I was also very happy to have had this opportunity to dance it as a presentation for friends, and with someone else who can also dance Sevillanas (which is both a flamenco dance and a folk dance in South Spain).

It turned out that Tamara, a Spanish girl from Madrid, also dances Sevillanas. Though she is not from South Spain where most people can dance Sevillanas, she has learned to dance sevillanas and some flamenco in childhood since her family loves flamenco.
After some wonderings I decided to put on one of my flamenco dresses I brought from Japan, for otherwise I probably may end up not wearing them ever again! So I brought one dress for myself and a manton (big scarf used for flamenco) and a flamenco skirt for Tamara. And I think I made a right decision - both Tamara and I were glad that we wore the dresses; it is always so much better to perform in real costumes for a presentation! (The only problem was that my hairdo was messed up a short while after starting dancing, as you can see in the pictures above and below. I wish I was better at doing my hair @@;)

The presentation was very successful and both Tamara and I enjoyed dancing togehter a lot! Thanks to Amy, a friend of mine, who came to see the presentation that day and took a lot of pictures of us dancing, I have some photos to share here.
Thank you Tamara for dancing with me, and thank you Amy for the great photos :-)

The International Spouses Circle (ISC)'s gathering that day was an "International Dance Session", and we also enjoyed Sandy's salsa and melange workshop, and Maya's Egiptian/Middle-Eastern dance workshop as well. It was a lot of fun! Thank you Sandy for organizing the event and International Spouses' Circle (^^).