Bike racks are everywhere; they come in all sorts of shapes too. Lots of possibilities for movement, if the bike racks aren't being used much for their actual purpose, anyhow. I got lucky in Galway earlier last week and found a set of at the local university, blissfully empty thanks to the dearth of students during the summer.
I only had about ten minutes to spare before the bus arrived to take us into Galway proper, but ten minutes is still plenty to experiment a bit and have some fun. Here's what I came up with:
I'll be on the lookout for bike racks like that again. With a bit more of a warm-up and more time I could find even more ways to play and improve on the existing ones.
Dance Practice & Progress
Since the [Digging for Energy](http://playeverywhere.co/blog/digging-for-energy-how-play-feeds-the-body-and-soul "Digging for Energy: How Play Feeds the Body and Soul (and where I potentially make a fool of myself) post I've continued my (near daily) practice of dance, even while spending a solid month on an Icelandic farm. I never recorded enough video during my early days of Parkour training to properly track my progress, but I've been doing that with dance and it's nice to see significant tangible improvements over these past few months. I still have massive room for improvement in all areas, but here are two of the most recent raw practice sessions (still full improv, aside from having some ideas to work on):
You Got to Change
We Won't Land
I'm all videos and little writing today, more normal (and frequent) blog posts will be returning over the next month as I've wrapped up my combo of volunteering on farms and internet hiatus that this foray to Europe turned into.
I feel on the whole that aside from these videos I keep dance wrapped up more often than not and only do it on my own. Well, until yesterday. During the final day in Ireland my girlfriend and I were in a park in Dublin practicing rolls, random martial arts drills, and then later some floreio and dance. I guess the dance moves caught the eye of a trio of Libyan ladies and they came on over and asked a) if I was a dancer and b) would I show them something? I'm slowly becoming comfortable with A and after some internal mental prodding and gentle encouragement I agreed to dance a bit. I pulled out my crap phone and put on a song. To beat the initial hesitation I blocked out everything but the music and just started moving and it worked out.
So yeah, new challenge overcome: dancing to an attentive crowd. It feels different to me than when teaching or demonstrating other movement (Parkour, martial arts, etc.). It's scarier to me right now, but I like it.