*07/28, Monday – Lisa contacted me during the weekend to see if I could make it to a meeting that Monday. I told her Henry and I could make it to the meeting so we headed over that day after work. We introduced ourselves to each other and told each other about our motivations regarding Dance Ministry. There was Lisa, our motivated leader who had a huge passion for the ministry of dance. There was Charlotte, the former ballerina who stopped formal training. There was Matt, the popper who dabbles in bboying. There was Albert, who was naturally talented in knowing how to move and make it look good without any training needed. Then there was me, a former GRX SF Dance Ministry core team lead who wanted to reach out and help with tools and experience I got from before. And of course, there is Henry, brimming with skill, talent and experience as well as creative ideas and leadership experience. He is our only real choreographer but Lisa is really pushing for the team to come up with the choreography.

We also talked about the vision, the song that Lisa had in mind, thinking of choreography, availabilities and such. We listened to the song and tried to freestyle to it in hopes of coming up with some choreo. I couldn’t do anything. Nothing came to mind, just ideas of execution but no actual dance moves. Henry had two eight counts down and he taught it to us like a class. Albert got Henry to check out some moves on video and Henry broke the moves down and taught us. It was good to get our adrenalin flowing and people had fun.

*8/02, Saturday – Henry and I showed up late as we had just come from his office in Jersey City. Our assignment was to have a move we do well and teach it to people. Well, we didn’t exactly do this completely but Albert taught us how to c-walk and Henry supplemented the lesson. I still don’t get it completely but I have a better idea of some of the variations of it. Henry also taught us the history of c-walk. We also reviewed the moves we learned from the last meeting. Much thanks to Henry for taking charge on getting the wheels moving during the meetings and much thanks to Lisa for taking charge on getting the ministry moving with organizing meetings and gathering people and making sure our hearts are in the right place.

*8/04, Monday – We learned african dancing from Lisa today. It was different from what we knew but it taught us not to be so restrained and to dance more freely without trying to control our bodies so much. I think it actually helped not only in helping give us some adrenalin to work with but also in psychologically getting us to not be so restrained. We are still not very open to each other and are more reserved in dancing among each other, especially me =P.

We also got our creative juices flowing as we tried to actually visualize more of the execution (which I liked doing more than trying to come up with actual choreo). We actually brainstormed a lot together and flushed out ideas to the point that we had a good outline of the story we wanted to tell. At first I was very into it and coming up with ideas. I admit I was so caught up in what I was thinking that I didn’t hear Henry’s ideas out completely but it turned out that he was bringing a bunch of ideas together to come up with a good idea. Our assignment next week was to think of more songs to add on to the performance. I already had one in mind. This meeting wasn’t as big on dancing but it was big on making the ‘performance’ more real in our heads. Our initial goal is October. It was good to set certain goals and come up with action items to make it feel like we are really doing something for this ministry. I’m pretty excited to see where this leads!