by Robert White

Random Notes from The 2008 Frenchie Balboa Festival in Toulouse, France (Dec. 5-7)

By Bobby White  (Photographs by Kate Hedin)

Toulouse France is a small city in Southern France known as “The Pink City” because of the distinct pink bricks and stone that compose many of the older buildings. It’s home to the Pink City Balboa Festival, which is now called the Frenchie Balboa Festival (we tend to say “FBF”, or “Fubuf” if we’ve had more than one glass of wine.)

The Frenchie Balboa Festival has become one of our favorite events to teach at. Aside from being organized incredibly well, many of our European friends attend, and it gives Kate a chance to use all of the French she learned in school, most of which involves finding out where the bathroom is and names of furniture.

Picture by Kate Hedin

There’s a mistaken belief I want to clear up. A lot of young dancers dream of being flown to exotic locations and teaching dance. I’m not going to lie to you and say it isn’t fun. It’s incredibly fun. But I can guarantee that it isn’t as fun as you think.

Kate and I went to Toulouse for seven days. Of those days, two were spent folded up into airplane seats made for Victorians and trying not to punch out Delta personnel burning us with their lip-gloss. Another four were spent teaching back-to-back classes, dancing all night, and judging contests where almost everyone is at the same level, and doing all of it jetlagged and with little sleep. This left only one day for us to realize we were actually in another country.

(Last year we only had a few days off to teach at the Paris Balboa-Shag Festival. We literally went straight from cars to classes and dances and back to the airport, having never even seen one landmark that let us know we were in Paris.)

The good thing is, we love doing it.

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The French have a peculiar way of scheduling the time at a workshop. They like to have workshops from 10a.m. to 5 p.m., just like most events. Then, it’s four or even five hours for dinner break, which is an excellent idea until you realize the dance actually gets going around 10 p.m, and contests are likely to finish around 1 or 2 a.m. This means everyone is going on two or three hours of sleep. (Also, it should be noted that dinner breaks are scheduled long because it can often take upwards of four days to get your check in a French restaurant.)

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Picture by Kate Hedin

To encourage my studying habits, I only brought GRE study materials with me for downtime. This was a big mistake, because I forgot the crucial fact that what a swing dance teacher wants to do most in their downtime is sit around in ugly shorts and watch “Arrested Development” and “30 Rock.”

The only English channel they had was BBC news, which was rather depressing, So I flipped around until I found the Simpsons in French. It was watchable until Krusty the Clown started talking with a soft tenor, as if he didn’t live off of booze and Marlboro reds. However, I have to say “Full House” in German is much funnier than in English.

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There’s a secret art to teaching in a foreign country. One has to mime most of the class for people who can’t understand English, and when you do speak you have to speak slow enough that they can understand but not slow enough so that you come off as condescending. Making sound effects helps.

Despite my previous joke, Kate does pretty good French and that’s extremely helpful in French classes because she understands questions, and can spot it when a class translator is adding their own interpretations to the translation. Which has happened, and is easily noticed when they talk for five times as long as you just did. I guess it’s slightly better than when you talk for five minutes and the translator only says two sentences to translate.

All together, it quickly makes people better visual teachers, and makes them talk less and chose their words very carefully.

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Picture by Kate Hedin

FBF coincides with the city’s Christmas festival, the Marche De Noel. Amongst a lot of booths selling travel junk, many of the local farmers sell their best cheeses, sausages, and cheese-potatoes. Cheese potatoes are an elastic substance made of nothing but cheese, potatoes, and butter, and you can throw them at people. They also sell a hot chocolate that is nothing more than melted milk chocolate.

Last year, balboa instructor Randy Maestretti, who secretly wants to be a French cheese-maker, bought a handful of goat cheeses (some of which smelled like death), a handful of sausages (some of which smelled like death stuffed in pig intestines), and some cheap wine (two bottles for $3). Trapped in the basement of a house in freezing weather, we had an incredible night.

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Strangest award I’ve ever received: The first time I was in Toulouse, I won third place in the Jack and Jill. My prize was a jar of duck preserved in it’s own fat. Turns out to be a Toulouse delicacy.

Photo by Kate Hedin

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In Toulouse, Bernard and Anne Helen support a family of two kids, three cats, and a dog, all on dance. Bernard says it’s a lot easier for the French than in the states; In France, when people sign up for classes, they sign up for a series that lasts from Autumn to Spring, roughly nine months of classes, and pay for it all at once.

Anne Helen and Bernard teach four nights a week and run four or five events a year, including the Studio Hop Summer Camp, an intimate Herrang-like event that takes place in a southern French Villa in the middle of nowhere. It is expanding from two to three weeks this year, a week of Balboa, a week of Lindy, and a week of jazz dance.

I only recommend going if you are open to spending a week dancing, swimming, and drinking wine in a pastoral setting populated by attractive, dark-skinned natives and sheep. People who are used to disappointment in life simply wouldn’t be able to handle it.

Picture by Kate Hedin

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