I had my first commercial (well, paid and for the entertainment of others) dancing experience yesterday. Once we got started and my nerves subsided (actually quite quickly) it was fantastic fun and a great afternoon.

Thanks to some encouragement from a good friend (Rachel) I started salsa dancing at a club in Redhill (Mondays, 8pm - 10pm in O'Neils) in January 2005. Since then I've peaked at three salsa classes in a week! I am now just back to the Monday night classes for salsa, but have added the occasional jive (modern/ceroc/leroc and 1940s) class as well.

Intermittently, since around November 2005 I have been doing 1940s jive (apparently known by lots of names including Jitterbug and East Coast Swing).

The event on Saturday was a staff party day for a large company. Over 3,000 guests were expected to be attending. The entire event had a 1950s theme, complete with custom built 50s diner, old cars driving around and of course a group of 50s jivers! We were only one of many, many entertainments taking place but for the afternoon we had our own little stage (actually a very nice wooden floor with a good spring to it), DJ and a reasonable audience!

The entire event was in Osterley Park and hence outdoors. The weather wasn't perfect for over three hours of dancing, being rather warm and sunny, but thankfully the weather didn't include any rain at least.

There were 16 of us who were dancing and during our 3.5 hour period we put on several demo dances and lessons of both jive and strolls. A surprisingly large number of people actually joined in - easily more than 30 at times.

It was really a very pleasant day. I hope the audience enjoyed it as much! :-)