Rasta – Euforija (choreo)

This is the video that almost broke me. I came very close to crying over it a time or two. To say I stressed over it would be an understatement.

Truth be told, I’m not completely satisfied with it because I can see where some of my cues could have been better and my moves could have been sharper and, in some cases, less sloppy. I wanted it to be perfect. It’s not. However, I know that if I want to get better at creating choreo, at cueing moves, and at editing videos then I need to brace myself for these bumps in the road and learn from them.

I can at least take some comfort in knowing that, according to my husband, many of the issues were somewhat out of my control since I was using HitFilm 4 Express and it didn’t have the precision I needed to get the video to match the audio file. We ended up using Adobe Premier Pro so I could edit down to 1/100 of a second instead of 5/100. In short, my choreo was basically appearing slightly offbeat somewhere between the upbeat and the downbeat just enough to make my life unpleasant for the past three weeks.

OK, so let’s get down to the actual video and quit crying over spilt video splices…

I previously talked about my guilty pleasure known as Turbofolk. Well, Balkaton is an offshoot of that and it’s my new obsession. My husband could take or leave Turbofolk, but he’s equally enamored with this newer genre. We end up listening to this song and a handful of others on repeat when we want to get things done and need an energetic soundtrack.

I’m very fortunate because most of the places I currently teach Zumba® allow me to play pretty much whatever I want. I do my best to keep with the original intentions of the program and to stay true to the basic rhythms we’ve learned, while also mixing in a balanced dose of international and Top 40s. I mention this because this song is not necessarily appropriate for all venues, so Instructor discretion is advised.

How to put it? I wouldn’t say this song is any “worse” than the overtly sexual lyrics that Pitbull, a Zumba®staple, and other artists use in many songs that are popular among the community. But you probably can’t get away with playing Pitbull’s song Shake Señora in, let’s say, a church setting, since T-Pain sings “You just bend it on over / I’ll get behind and you can get mine,” for example.

This song makes reference to a slang for marijuana and talks, not too discretely, about sexy times. Loosely translated, Rasta sings that the woman he’s with is a sex machine and that after 3 hours she’s not tired and he can tell she wants to go another round. There aren’t any swear words and it’s pretty vague about this close encounter. If nothing else, it’s a song about his effect on her because he’s just so fly. So, with that knowledge, you can decide if this would be a song you’d feel comfortable with bringing to class. Honestly, unless your students speak Serbian or a similar language, they probably wouldn’t even have a clue what the song is about beyond the term “sex-laboritorija.”

Enjoy!

Recording choreo with T3G Media