Discworld and dancing

I had a good time at  Discworld!

The morris workshops went well.  In fact, they went so well that we did several extra practice sessions at the request of the dancers and they put on a polished performance in front of several hundred people to loud applause.

I now feel a lot more confident about teaching the two Border Morris dances that we'll be teaching to Anonymous Morris for their first session.

I also got to teach longsword dancing to the assassins who performed it with plastic daggers (as we hadn't got any proper dance swords).  I managed to successfully modify the dance to work with the shorter weapons (you have to cut out figures where people step over the swords, and slightly modify the nut as the daggers are too short to lock together well.  Modifying the nut actually led to a nice follow-on figure where all the daggers were pulled out together and flourished.  (longsword dancing is an English traditional dance from the Northumberland/Durham area and is usually done by around half a dozen dancers in a circle holding their wooden swords in a circle)

This clip isn't my dancers, but gives you a rough idea of what longsword dancing is like  (it uses fairly simple figures, but then I didn't have time to teach my group the more complex options).  The 'nut' is when they join all the swords together in a five or six pointed star.

The longsword team got a great audience reaction as well.  (they hadn't had quite as much practice time as their first workshop was a day later, but I was still very pleased by the result)

I didn't tell either workshop that I'd never previously danced the dances I was teaching them...  (Watched them, researched them, plotted them out on paper, danced single positions on the lounge floor - but never had the chance to perform them with a set of dancers)

I did other things as well, and they were fun, but the final morris performance was undoubtedly the high spot for me (and some of the dancers told me the morris dancing had been the best part of their weekend as well - they were a great group and really gelled together)

If anyone wants me to run workshops on North West Morris/Border Morris /Longsword/Rapper dancing at any convention, just ask!  (I need an excuse to buy my own set of longswords and rapper swords...)

(I don't yet feel competent to teach Cotswold morris - the footwork is more complex - but I'd love an excuse to have to go away and learn...)

Longsword

I was just given a link by petra to a lovely longsword dance.

Longsword isn't everyone's cup of tea, it's slower and less showy than rapper, but when done really well, it has an elegance all of its own.  Look at the precision of the sword work here - all the dancers move in unison, swords at the same height, lines/circles properly formed.  There's also a life and an energy to the dance and a crispness to moves like stepping over the swords that can often look clumsy when done by poorer dancers.