I just got back from Herräng, and it was totally awesome!
The official overview of Herräng 2013 week 2:
However, that misses out on all sorts of really cool things.
First of all: auditions. Auditions are an always necessary but painful aspect of dancing workshops. There’s too many people for one group, so you need to split it somehow. Herräng campe up with an interesting idea: peer auditions.
In a nutshell, you dance with about 7-10 different people. Each of them rates you, and you rate each of them. These ratings are then used to divide you into groups. Obvious advantages include that you’ll be dancing with a group of people that want to dance with you (it’s quite common for people to “challenge” the auditions and try to move up, because they feel they’re better than the folks in their level). An interesting aspect is that your fellow dancers will not only judge your technique, but also your charm and your innovativeness — well, basically they will rate you based on how much “fun” the dance was. A surprising move might well push you up!
Which probably explains why I ended up one group above the other “Luxemburgers”. Actually, for two days I thought I was one below – I mean, I know they all dance better than me. Then someone explained to me that no, it was the other way around. Mind-boggling, but ah well.
The peer auditions were validated by teacher auditions the next morning. This was no longer very scary, since we were already divided into groups. I guess the teachers were mainly looking to see if anything was amiss. I think they found little to correct, so the peer auditions worked sufficiently well. I ended up in a wonderful group, so for me it worked out.
We had a great week together and learned a lot. One of the coolest things was that when there was a large surplus of leaders, the leaders would hook up together and practice the current figure together. Given that you’re dancing with pretty advanced dancers, that worked surprisingly well.
Thanks to this and some leaders not being hesitant about leading a guy, I actually managed to get some serious following done. Besides the guys from my class, I also danced with one guy from Advanced, and with Juan. So yeah, I can follow a bit if I dance with really good leaders… well, that’s kind of cheating, but okay :)
Lots of other things happened, including a juggling and hip hop class (I taught the juggling part), me following a Capoeira class (muscles responded: OUCH!), late night parties, and a severe case of the Herräng flu (it’s been 8 days, and I’m finally starting to recover).
All in all: wonderful, I’m coming back for more!