Dance of the Month
Before I begin with some new dances I would like to take a couple
of minutes to chat about grace. Grace is this strange ability that
allows your dancing to appear to be a lot better than it actually
is. Grace includes the little flourishes here and there, the extra
jigs added to trenchmore, and so on but primarily grace is the
ability that causes your dancing to appear, not just as a jerky
sequence of unrelated steps, but as a smooth, flowing connected
whole. Although I can point out at practice something that appears
to be graceful and something that does not it is very difficult to
put the flow of moves into words.
Perhaps the simplest way to begin is to connect each of the
movements in the dance, any dance. For purposes of illustration
let's use the chorus to Rufty-Tufty. (set and turn, set and turn,
join R hands with partner double away, turn and double back,
cloverleaf to corner. Join left hands with corner double away,
turn and double back, cloverleaf back to partner for those who
don't quite remember) Commonly this is danced as hop left STOP.
Hop right STOP. Turn STOP. Hop left STOP. Hop right STOP. Turn
STOP. Join right hands with partner double out. Stumble through
turn. double in STOP. and so on through the rest of the chorus.
(Admittedly this is an amalgum of all the mistakes I see being made
- other than people forgetting the steps - not the result of
watching any one person.)
As I said above the first thing is to make this appear to be a
connected whole. When you do the hop to the left use the motion to
push you back to the right so that you never come to a full stop.
The same holds true going from the hop to the turn, use the motion
to connect the parts. As you reach the end of the double out,
instead of stopping then turning use the same time to pivot on your
inside foot so that the turn flows out of the steps. In the same
way the cloverleaf should flow out of the double in. This one step
alone will make your dancing appear MANY times better to those
watching and believe me people do watch.
So the key words for the next little while are grace and flow. In
next month's issue or maybe the one following I will start to talk
about the flourishes that can be added to the dance (and if a
couple of people ask maybe even how to use those flourishes in
comabt hole in the wall).
Now for that dance:
War Bransle (circle)
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4 sets of bransle doubles (L&R), 2 doubles (L&R), 2 singles (L&R),
double L, 2 singles (R&L), double R, single L, kick (R,L,R), hop
Heart's ease (set up as rufty tufty)
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2x { double in, reverance, double out}
CHORUS: join hands with corner, double back, double in, face corner
and join both hands, spin 1 turn (lady into set), join hand with
partner, double in, double out, face partner, join hands and spin
VERSE 2: siding
VERSE 3: arming