Saturday 24 October 2015

I love afterparties (and heels and flats)

I love afterparties - especially when everybody's almost too tired to stand up, but they still want to dance. They just want to dance. They're high as kites on dancing. Somebody DJs. Somebody has a portable speaker. Somehow a room has been found. And it just sort of happens. There's that wonderful no-obligation feeling where everything that was supposed to happen has already either happened, or not, and everything else is a bonus. If only we could bottle that feeling.


It's quite a bit easier, as a follower, to dance close-embrace tango on a bit of a heel, especially at first. To dance well in flat shoes with your feet properly down, you need pretty good posture and technique. Of course, you can do that, and a few women never wear heels at all. Others just don't feel right without heels. Others just see heels in moderation as part of the dressing-up fun, which is where I am most of the time. There are some men I prefer to wear heels for, and it's usually more a matter of dance style than height: if someone throws boleos around my axis then it works more smoothly for me in heels. I'd rather be in flats to lead, but the better the follower, the less it matters. At an afterparty, I'm going to be in flats.

But the point is, I often think flat feet are wonderfully expressive, and these ones are particularly nice, which is why I started videoing them in the first place. Try watching it with the sound off, and notice how much you can hear the music. A minute later I was dancing again.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wouldn't it be lovely if you could have a weekend-long after-party...

msHedgehog said...

I know! I wish! But I'm not sure it works without the Before. I'm trying to find a way of doing a sort of fake afterparty that gets part of the same effect, to the extent that's possible. There are two major practical obstacles here in London: travel time, and the high cost of floor space.

Anonymous said...

Oh, what an interesting idea! How are you going to get the no-obligation vibe?

msHedgehog said...

I don't think that part is really possible; the nearest thing would be some combination of happening at rather short notice and having exactly the right guest list. Each of which by itself is obviously very difficult to achieve in London conditions - at least unless it's hanging off some other event.