Carole Edrich Weblog

Lesson with Mercedes Ruiz

Every Tuesday and Thursday Mercedes and her boyfriend drive from Jerez to Sevilla to give a course at Daniela's studio. An accomplished flamenco guitarist in his own right, he accompanies her at the end of each lesson while she sings and the students dance. This creates a wonderful atmosphere and is a great way of consolidating lessons, one of which I was privileged to watch last night.

On stage Mercedes presents as a strong woman who has experienced all of life’s joys and pains but off stage she has an engaging aura of vulnerability and delicate, graceful fragility that contrasts elegantly with her boyfriend's solid strength.

Even in the lesson the subtle elegance of her moves convey discipline and controlled passion: qualities only a great bailaora possesses. She’s a thoughtful, structured teacher who builds the lesson so that parts of the warm-up and technique combine with other compas to a seamless greater whole. It was a joy to see her dance again, even in the confines of a practice studio as part of the lesson she was giving.

As usual I got lost on the way back and the walk took about double the time it should. That's all part of the fun and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Miguel Vargas didn’t contact me so I wasn’t able to interview him. It’s a shame, because he’s very photogenic and I’d have liked to have covered more of his experience teaching the Japanese ladies I interviewed on Tuesday.

Tsutomu saw the ballet.co entry that mentioned him today. It turns out that he started his own blog for family and friends, which is now visited by about 1,000 people a week! Unfortunately for us (although not; I suspect, for his family) it's in Japanese. He’s off to Granada now and after that will continue his world tour to Italy and Paris.

This was my last day learning Spanish at Don Quijote. It has been fun and I only wish I could have stayed for a few more weeks.

Tomorrow I start a cycle tour of Andalusia. It will be an interesting and challenging week as well as initial preparation for the Grand Canyon Cycle Tour that I hope to do in aid of MENCAP in September. There'll not be much time for dance for a while..

Posted by carole at June 3, 2005 02:16 PM